The Shift Toward Composite Machining

The concept of a material stronger than steel, but light as plastic, may possibly be a boon to design engineers in almost any industry. Yet the awareness of its awesome prospectives have been slow chiefly due to cost.The composites machining industry is making strides, nevertheless, in researching and creating materials and processes that make highly useful parts of a more logical cost. This trend is noteworthy for metalworking professionals who more and more will find themselves machining materials that contain little or no metal at all. The application of non-metallic materials to jet aircraft engines is relatively new, and there continue to be innovations in the field of composites.Demand for composites—characteristically carbon or glass fiber-reinforced plastics and multi-material laminates—has been progressively growing in recent years, predominantly in the aerospace and wind turbine blade manufacturing markets.There is good reason for the enthusiasm over composites machining. These materials offer an incredible combination of properties unlike any metal. An I-beam made of graphite-epoxy, for example, has about half the weight of aluminium, yet a resistance to tensile stress just about equal to that of titanium. Moreover, many Composite Machining materials have exhaustion lives many times greater than their metallic counterparts. And, non-metallic composites are extremely resistant to corrosion.With severe pressure to reduce costs, much effort has gone to make Composite Manufacturing more competent. It is the results of this move that are bringing composites more into the mainstream of manufacturing materials.Machining composites is very different from machining metals, and machining one type of composite is nowhere near the same as machining another composite. Moreover, the range of composite materials is wider than that of metals. Machining composites needs a reassessment of methods, tools, setup and in some cases even machinery and fixturing.