Geoff Wood- Profile Composites, Craig Snyder- Bayer, Michael Fancher- NCMS
NCMS was formally recognized last week for the creation of a new process for creating high pressure hydrogen storage tanks for vehicles. The JEC Innovation awards identify the most innovative composite solutions worldwide and contribute to the advancement of the composite industry.
NCMS brought together Profile Composites, Inc; Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America; Bayer MaterialScience, LLC; MAG Cincinnati Automation; and A&P Technology to design a new manufacturing process to increase production volume. The team used a resin material custom formulated by Bayer and applied it to a dry fiber preform, rather than the conventional – and slow – filament winding process of the traditional model. As a result, a new tank is ready for market 18x faster than filament winding, and project partners are confident that speeds can be doubled with additional improvements to the process.
NCMS is no stranger to global recognition for its collaborative R&D management model: the Michigan-based non-profit has won six Defense Manufacturing Excellence Awards and five consecutive R&D 100 Awards. NCMS also administers the Robotics Technology Consortium for the Defense Department, overseeing over 100 participating companies and a budget in the hundreds of millions. Recently, another collaborative NCMS DoE project made headlines as two recently developed fuel cell stacks served as the sole source of power for an Oakland, California passenger bus for more than 130 hours over two weeks, a fantastic example of NCMS innovation taking one step closer to mass-market reality.
