Toray & Specialty Materials partner for next-gen aerospace composite structures

Toray Advanced Composites has strengthened their commercial partnership with Specialty Materials this October at CAMX 2022. The joint collaboration will improve the supply chain by uniting Specialty’s boron fiber with Toray Composite Materials America’s domestically produced high-strength intermediate modulus carbon fibers T1100G and a variety of Toray Advanced Composites’ resin systems including toughened epoxies, cyanate esters, bismaleimides, and polyimides for the Specialty Materials’ Gen 2 Hy-Bor® product family.

The Composites and Advanced Materials Expo (CAMX) 2022 is currently taking place in Anaheim, CA from October 17-20. The exposition is the largest, most comprehensive composites and advanced materials event in North America.

Toray and Specialty Materials’ next-generation product family is a high-performance hybrid prepreg tailored to enhance the structural efficiency of composite structures such as spars, longerons, rotors, and control surfaces for aerospace applications by tuning compression and stiffness properties. “Our relationship with Toray Advanced Composites has enabled this unique prepreg portfolio which provides engineering teams new options for optimizing performance of composite structures,” said Monica Rommel, CEO of Specialty Materials.

This commercial partnership enables engineers to easily control and manage key variables for unique solution innovations with domestically produced high-quality products within the US supply chain. “Toray Advanced Composites partnership with Specialty Materials leverages both companies’ technologies to tailor a solution to the most demanding applications,” commented Joe Morris, Director of DoD programs from Toray Advanced Composites.

Related:

• Overair Selects Toray for Advanced Composite Materials in Butterfly eVTOL Prototype – July 2022
• Lilium Jet to be Fitted with Toray Industries High Performance Composite Materials – July 2020

Why it’s important: As many eVTOL and air taxi OEMs near production-ready designs and begin manufacturing at scale, they will increasingly be reliant on dependable suppliers to provide affordable composite assemblies. Many OEMs are creating one-of-a-kind airframes with unique geometries that can only be achieved via custom composite structures with top-grade materials. The partnership between Toray and Specialty Materials is likely to culminate in a source of structural components for these nascent air taxi manufacturers, such as Overair, Lilium, and Joby Aviation who already have long-term contracts with Toray.