#115 Alan Harper Composites on Reusable Bags during JEC World 2024
22.03.2024 17 min Staffel 5 Episode 72
Zusammenfassung & Show Notes
Have you ever seen 35,000 (in words Thirtyfivethousand) volts in action?
Alan Harper shows you how you can decrease cost in composites production.
Ian Flavell, Director of a composites manufacturing firm in the UK and André Antunes from Brasil give reallife examples and explain in quite some detail, how much you can save with reusable bags.
Not only is the cost saving a factor that I liked, but also reducing lots of production waste and last, but not least, the surface quality are beyond perfect. Look at the biofibre part. We all know that these pose a challenge sometimes due to natural variances.
Thank you Alan Harper Composites Ltd. and team for the insights into your technology.
And Alan, I need to commend you on your entertaining skills. You are talented with demonstrating complex technical matters in easy to understand language.
Community, what do you think?
Alan Harper shows you how you can decrease cost in composites production.
Ian Flavell, Director of a composites manufacturing firm in the UK and André Antunes from Brasil give reallife examples and explain in quite some detail, how much you can save with reusable bags.
Not only is the cost saving a factor that I liked, but also reducing lots of production waste and last, but not least, the surface quality are beyond perfect. Look at the biofibre part. We all know that these pose a challenge sometimes due to natural variances.
Thank you Alan Harper Composites Ltd. and team for the insights into your technology.
And Alan, I need to commend you on your entertaining skills. You are talented with demonstrating complex technical matters in easy to understand language.
Community, what do you think?
Transkript
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0
\margl1418\margr1418\margb1418\margt1418\deflang1033\lndscpsxn
{\colortbl;
\red0\green0\blue0;
\red80\green80\blue80;
}
{\fonttbl;
{\f0 Arial}
}
{\pard\b\sb500\sa500\qc\f0\fs28\cf1 Alan Harper Composites on Reusable Bags during JEC World 2024.m4a\b0\par}
{\pard\sb150\sa0\f0\fs17\cf2 00:00:03\par}
{\i\f0\fs22\cf1 Speaker 1: \i0}
{\pard\sb160\sa0\f0\fs22\cf1 Composites launched their podcast with fewer and fewer and fewer of them. Verbund. Wagstaff. Production and unwinding. We're presenting the innovation and know how that's done in life and in lust. Present. Von deinem host aus Bayreuth. So wonderful. Good afternoon, Darlington community and composites launch members and experts out there. We are going strong on Jack world 2024. This is our afternoon session with Mr. Alan Harper, who just came out of Thailand yesterday night and stood on the bus already at nine in the morning. Welcome to our show, Alan.\par}
{\pard\par}
{\pard\sb150\sa0\f0\fs17\cf2 00:00:56\par}
{\i\f0\fs22\cf1 Speaker 2: \i0}
{\pard\sb160\sa0\f0\fs22\cf1 Thank you very much.\par}
{\pard\par}
{\pard\sb150\sa0\f0\fs17\cf2 00:00:57\par}
{\i\f0\fs22\cf1 Speaker 1: \i0}
{\pard\sb160\sa0\f0\fs22\cf1 So you you come from, uh, from Thailand. No jetlag because you can, uh, sleep.\par}
{\pard\par}
{\pard\sb150\sa0\f0\fs17\cf2 00:01:03\par}
{\i\f0\fs22\cf1 Speaker 2: \i0}
{\pard\sb160\sa0\f0\fs22\cf1 On the plane.\par}
{\pard\par}
{\pard\sb150\sa0\f0\fs17\cf2 00:01:03\par}
{\i\f0\fs22\cf1 Speaker 1: \i0}
{\pard\sb160\sa0\f0\fs22\cf1 Sleep on the plane. So that's great. And we can start immediately off in a, in a in a great way. We can. Guys, I've met Alan. You have to know. Or at Iks in in Milton Keynes in England.\par}
{\pard\par}
{\pard\sb150\sa0\f0\fs17\cf2 00:01:18\par}
{\i\f0\fs22\cf1 Speaker 2: \i0}
{\pard\sb160\sa0\f0\fs22\cf1 Yeah.\par}
{\pard\par}
{\pard\sb150\sa0\f0\fs17\cf2 00:01:18\par}
{\i\f0\fs22\cf1 Speaker 1: \i0}
{\pard\sb160\sa0\f0\fs22\cf1 Because it I was immediately attracted because I never saw a UK gentleman with a hat. So Ellen Allen is the UK gentleman with the hat. And I asked him particularly to be on my composite 360 on tour show, because the hat is one thing. Um, he is a gentleman, it's the other thing. And the other thing is, of course, the topic of sustainability. And before we dive into sustainability in the composites reduction, we want to decrease your cost of production. That's our passion reducing costs of production. We want to introduce you also to Andre Andre. Please have a short introduction of yourself.\par}
{\pard\par}
{\pard\sb150\sa0\f0\fs17\cf2 00:01:59\par}
{\i\f0\fs22\cf1 Speaker 2: \i0}
{\pard\sb160\sa0\f0\fs22\cf1 Hello. Nice to meet you to all the, uh, composites lounge followers. And, uh, I'm glad to be here and to be invited to take part of this great show that's doing great for our industry, uh, transferring knowledge and, uh, presenting great cases. I'm from Brazil. I distribute Alan Harper for Latin America and some other countries around the world. And, uh, it's been ten years of adventure, I think about 15,000m² of silicone bag placed around our area. And, uh, I think we're here just because we've one of the many cases of successes of Alan Harper composites. So thanks for bringing this innovation to our territory and making this, uh, an opportunity for us to make the world cleaner, nicer and more productive. So nice.\par}
{\pard\par}
{\pard\sb150\sa0\f0\fs17\cf2 00:02:50\par}
{\i\f0\fs22\cf1 Speaker 1: \i0}
{\pard\sb160\sa0\f0\fs22\cf1 Thank you very much, Andre. So we're very happy with Andre's activity in South America, because he's made a big impression in the South America, especially Brazil and Argentina, Venezuela.\par}
{\pard\par}
{\pard\sb150\sa0\f0\fs17\cf2 00:03:05\par}
{\i\f0\fs22\cf1 Speaker 2: \i0}
{\pard\sb160\sa0\f0\fs22\cf1 Colombia nowadays. Yeah, yeah, yeah.\par}
{\pard\par}
{\pard\sb150\sa0\f0\fs17\cf2 00:03:08\par}
{\i\f0\fs22\cf1 Speaker 1: \i0}
{\pard\sb160\sa0\f0\fs22\cf1 Okay. Anyway, so it's just not happening here in Europe, but it's also happening in the East and the West. So we're very happy to do that. Our main message is basically what we have there. We have basically eradicated, um, the consumable waste package for infusion. But that's not the only claim to fame here. We work with silicone membranes and using atmosphere to push the resin in. So we have a vacuum process. So that's our claim to fame. And we've seen we've been amazed at this year, 2024, at the actual amount of interest. Specifically, we're quite in the backwater here right at the top.\par}
{\pard\par}
{\pard\sb150\sa0\f0\fs17\cf2 00:03:52\par}
{\i\f0\fs22\cf1 Speaker 2: \i0}
{\pard\sb160\sa0\f0\fs22\cf1 Yeah. I just wanted to say over there is like the strip in Las Vegas. Yes. The big, big, big, big hotels. Yeah. The big, big brands. I appreciate all of them. Yeah. Uh, no gaming here we are a little community. So that you have an idea, uh, at, uh, at five L 132 is your boost number. We're a bit away from that main strip, but I'm seeing here everywhere in the surrounding busy booth.\par}
{\pard\par}
{\pard\sb150\sa0\f0\fs17\cf2 00:04:19\par}
{\i\f0\fs22\cf1 Speaker 1: \i0}
{\pard\sb160\sa0\f0\fs22\cf1 Yes. It demonstrates, actually, that people are looking us out because you don't get passing traffic here. You get people who've actually come up to the stand. And because they read about it through your your portal, through our portal, through our presentations on the LinkedIn and on the social media, um, people are obviously reading about that and they make a beeline here. So we're we've been delighted in the last day and a half already of the amount of volume of business that we're we're actually seeing here. And we we really feel this is a confidence in the message that now we're beginning to bring serious confirmation that we can save people money. And that's really what our business is, the huge savings in material costs, um, by using this process to make the parts.\par}
{\pard\par}
{\pard\sb150\sa0\f0\fs17\cf2 00:05:06\par}
{\i\f0\fs22\cf1 Speaker 2: \i0}
{\pard\sb160\sa0\f0\fs22\cf1 So the community we will run through not only the product itself, which we will come to it. So more interesting for you guys, as always, the application side, if I may, I would like to introduce also, Ian, maybe you can introduce yourself and tell us about the success story in the UK.\par}
{\pard\par}
{\pard\sb150\sa0\f0\fs17\cf2 00:05:26\par}
{\i\f0\fs22\cf1 Speaker 1: \i0}
{\pard\sb160\sa0\f0\fs22\cf1 Yeah. Can do. Um, this is a bit strange. Usually. Give me a mic. I want to sing.\par}
{\pard\par}
{\pard\sb150\sa0\f0\fs17\cf2 00:05:29\par}
{\i\f0\fs22\cf1 Speaker 2: \i0}
{\pard\sb160\sa0\f0\fs22\cf1 So do you feel free?\par}
{\pard\par}
{\pard\sb150\sa0\f0\fs17\cf2 00:05:31\par}
{\i\f0\fs22\cf1 Speaker 1: \i0}
{\pard\sb160\sa0\f0\fs22\cf1 We won't do that at the moment. Yeah. So I own a manufacturing company, uh, in the UK. Now, I set my business up six years ago, and I set it up solely to use silicon bagging in UK. The mindset for silicon. Well, no one really wanted to use it. They're all stuck on LTM, LTM, and RTM. Um, and what we've done as a business as showing that it works on a daily basis and we produce automotive and building is people bringing people in and saying, look, this does work. Now we've got a customer that we've now sort of changed their mindset completely. They are turning around about £32 million a year, spending £1 million on tooling every year. And they've only ever used RTM, and now they've got rid of all RTM. In the last 12 months, they've taken five tonne of silicon from us, and it's changing the face of what people are doing. So for me, from a business, we have saved a fortune running forward. Um, on silicon membrane. And I think it's great that everyone's mindset is changing. And that's thanks to Alan, really and what he's doing.\par}
{\pard\par}
{\pard\sb150\sa0\f0\fs17\cf2 00:06:38\par}
{\i\f0\fs22\cf1 Speaker 2: \i0}
{\pard\sb160\sa0\f0\fs22\cf1 Thank you very much, Ian. That's very great. And thank you for, um. Thank you for supporting us. And we hope we look forward to keeping you supported throughout the next few years. I come back to Andre and Andre. Maybe you can explain to the people what how is transformed to the the Brazilian market or the South American market.\par}
{\pard\par}
{\pard\sb150\sa0\f0\fs17\cf2 00:07:17\par}
{\i\f0\fs22\cf1 Speaker 1: \i0}
{\pard\sb160\sa0\f0\fs22\cf1 So basically we were a producer of composites in Chile and we use light RTM at that time, 2012, I believe we bought Allen System for 16 square meter tools, which at that point he never done. And he thought we were a little bit crazy. But uh, with his knowledge and teachings, we were more than able to make this a success story. And from that time we invested about $20,000. And right now, after two years producing, we saved $240,000. So that's about ten times return of investment, which I never seen much in many places. If you know something like that, I could put my money on you. But 20 times return of investment make me love the system and realize the potential of what we were doing. So I told Allen all the advantages and he brought me in. And since 2014, as I said, 15,000m² is a proven technology. All the bus companies, tractor companies and truck companies in Brazil and Latin America are adopting or have adopted thousands of silicone tools. So, uh, you don't need to be afraid. Will this work and will not work? If he said work, it works. So come over and talk to us, and you'll be sure to be saving thousands or hundreds of thousands, or maybe millions. That depends on you. I hope we continue to harvest great success.\par}
{\pard\par}
{\pard\sb150\sa0\f0\fs17\cf2 00:08:46\par}
{\i\f0\fs22\cf1 Speaker 2: \i0}
{\pard\sb160\sa0\f0\fs22\cf1 Well, I expect to be here next year and the year after. Yes, God willing, inshallah. As they say, some people say to me, how do you make sure if you have if how do you make sure that if you have a hole in your your membrane, you can find it? But we have a very, very interesting system here. And I'd like to show that to you now. And we use a high voltage to spark through a hole. And if you haven't seen it before, you would think it's something from Tesla. It's amazing. So I will just show you that how we find a hole very quickly in a membrane. Will you find a hole. And if you if you have a hole in your bag, normally we only look when we've just manufactured that because once it's manufactured, very seldom do we get a hole develop after in its production life, which could be 600 injections. But here we've actually destroyed this bag by making a hole in it under vacuum and that we couldn't use it. So to find that you how do you find it? And we're talking about a microscopic hole. So we use this what we call the vac stat. And we can spread across here a wand which has 35,000V on it. And we're underneath is a conducting surface. And we spread across and. If we find the hole. Ah, there's the hole. So it's jumping. The spark jumps through a hole that I can't even see. And we can fill that hole with a repair silicone, which we call 153 and repair it in a few seconds. And we're in business now. So that's just one of the innovations that we brought to our industry. The main the main part of Reusables is the word. They're reusable. And what we've come along to bring to the industry is a process which eliminates all consumables, consumables. I mean, when you want to put resin through fibers, you have to help the resin spread out. And usually the infusion you use flow mesh. And at the end of that operation you will make this amount of waste on a mold this size. This is the actual physical waste that we took from this bag when we didn't use a reusable. All this reusable machine membrane here will work 600 times, so 600 times of that is replaced by this. So how do we do that? The main thing is that it's self seals. There's a seal on the mold. And we can put it under vacuum and pull a vacuum very easily. We can also spread the resin around by introducing the resin at one point, as you can see here. And we spread it around and we eliminate the flow mesh by introducing what we call morph runners. It's a flow field. You can probably see these lines. You can see the lines here. And they will actually open momentarily to let the resin in and spread over the fiber. The here of the fiber is carbon fiber, very high density carbon fiber and glass fiber. And the resin will not flow through it over a meter or two meters or whatever, only a few centimeters. And therefore we've put in here a flow aid inside the membrane, which we will which will operate. Aidan, if you could switch that one on. But Aidan's just switched that channel on. You can see the channel has just self formed to allow the resin to flow. And that's the resin flows across. We switch on the next one and it flows across and we switch on the next one. And by this way we can actually externally control the resin flow into the fiber without using consumable flow mesh, which means this is just eliminates all that waste, which is a no brainer for most people. But it's now the technology exists to remove all that consumable waste, and when it's finished, we can eliminate that. So there's no channels left on the molded part. That's what we call morph flow fields. That's an innovation that we've brought to the industry. Now just move to another spot on the stand where we actually going to show you that the process is not confined to glass fiber. And actually carbon fiber. We can also be using flax and and certain resins. Here we have a flax product made from a mold that we have on the stand here that is being done by a small company in Cornwall in England called tonic. And they use flax and they're using the same system to make this part. And it's been infused with resin, um, into the flax with a very good surface finish for internal automotive parts. And you can see here the mold, which is a silicone mold which, which basically follows the same shape as the part and was self seal on a complex flange here to seal down and allow the resin to enter in through the, um, the resin point. Some people say, how do you actually apply the silicone? Well, you can buy the silicone in two forms. One of them, the smallest way in which you can do it is you can take a cassette or the canister like this, which is the A and B silicone. And put it through a handheld machine like this we see on the stand here, and that will allow you that's about 500 USD dollars. But if you've got much bigger parts to make, like a parcel of a wind turbine blade, then you would use a different machine. Which would I come and show you over here? So coming away from the smaller machine, which we call the micro top, we come to the Top Gear Silicon six. And this is a, a much higher output machine which will deliver to make several square meters in just an hour. Um, this takes the two resins through a mixing head to a spray nozzle, and it has a very good flexibility to hold at a very an arm's length to spray the resin so we can actually spray over three meters away and still get the the silicone applied to the mold or close up by applying the an angle to the the spray tip. That's an air operated. Machine. No electricity, entirely air operated machine. So that's how people use the silicon from the drum and put it into the silicon membranes. The silicon will cure in about ten minutes, so we can make a membrane in the morning and in the afternoon, take it off and try it so we can see the whole operation in one day of, say, a 4 or 5 square metre mould. Thank you. In my short trip here to France from, um, our place in, um, Thailand, I simply want to leave one message and that is, uh, this year, 2024, that we say from Allen Harbour, common sense, welcome to the future of composites, because we are bringing you a much lower cost of available technology to change your resin and into molded parts for the composites industry.\par}
{\pard\par}
{\pard\sb150\sa0\f0\fs17\cf2 00:15:58\par}
{\i\f0\fs22\cf1 Speaker 1: \i0}
{\pard\sb160\sa0\f0\fs22\cf1 Thanks for the rebar, Berlin. It was a really nice to meet you. And, uh, talk to you about your fantastic reusable bags here that I've seen here. Also another saying, improve working conditions. Yes. Yeah, improve working conditions. And that's all about because with with composites we are in the reinforcement side glass fiber textiles we have resins. They these are challenging sometimes working conditions anyway. And if someone can ease that working conditions that's of course some of our aims. Thank you very much. One more time Ellen.\par}
{\pard\par}
{\pard\sb150\sa0\f0\fs17\cf2 00:16:34\par}
{\i\f0\fs22\cf1 Speaker 2: \i0}
{\pard\sb160\sa0\f0\fs22\cf1 Thank you very much, very much, Ilka, for giving us the opportunity to bring this much more noble process to the composites industry. Thank you. Have a.\par}
{\pard\par}
{\pard\sb150\sa0\f0\fs17\cf2 00:16:43\par}
{\i\f0\fs22\cf1 Speaker 1: \i0}
{\pard\sb160\sa0\f0\fs22\cf1 Great show.\par}
{\pard\par}
{\pard\sb150\sa0\f0\fs17\cf2 00:16:44\par}
{\i\f0\fs22\cf1 Speaker 2: \i0}
{\pard\sb160\sa0\f0\fs22\cf1 Thank you very much. Okay, I appreciate it.\par}
{\pard\par}
{\pard\sb150\sa0\f0\fs17\cf2 00:16:47\par}
{\i\f0\fs22\cf1 Speaker 1: \i0}
{\pard\sb160\sa0\f0\fs22\cf1 The Composites Launch podcast done in Philly. Decent bit to do business tips to composites over in LinkedIn, Venezia, MIT, LinkedIn and the exclusive LinkedIn group composites launched by Todd Westwood. New technology trends, automation tools, and auf Wiedersehen.\par}
{\pard\par}
}