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3D Knitting

Preview image for the video "3D Knitting Process Bordeaux France".

Better, Faster, Cleaner

The 3D knitting technology will benefit any composite manufacturer that wishes to improve quality and decrease cost by automating their labor intensive lay-up process. 3D Knitting is a breakthrough technology to replace your manual lay-up process bringing speed, quality and economic benefits to your overall production.

The technology will knit a preform in one piece that may incorporate multiple materials such as carbon, glass or quartz. With this process, there is no raw material waste, cutting and lay-up times are significantly reduced. The thermoplastic resin can also be knit together with the reinforcement materials to enhance quality and reduce raw material handling cost.

3D knitting is a highly versatile technology which can be used to manufacture any shape, including complex geometries, and can meet demanding requirements often encountered high performance markets such as aerospace, marine, and automotive.

Saint-Gobain and Roctool

3D knitting joint effort with Roctool

To speed up the curing process (typically 5-10 hours), Roctool, a specialist in mold heating and cooling technologies for plastics and composites, developed a molding system that increased curing efficiency to 15-30 minutes for the polymerization of composite materials or the thermo-compression of thermoplastic parts, while increasing the production capacity of a single mold by a factor of 50. According to Roctool, the patented heat and cool layout provides a fast and homogeneous heating on the mold surface through flexible inductors run through by a high-frequency current, and efficient cooling by standard cooling channels with a fully turbulent water flow rate.

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