#232 From Industrialisation to Innovation Leadership: How PRF Is Shaping the Future of Composites in 2026
06.07.2026 17 min Staffel 5 Episode 190
Zusammenfassung & Show Notes
PRF Composite Materials Composites on Industrialisation, Sustainability and Growth
At JEC World 2026 in Paris, Composites Lounge spoke with Vincent Fawcett of PRF Composite Materials about the forces currently reshaping the composites industry and the company's role in helping manufacturers navigate this transition.
The conversation revealed a clear strategic focus on three interconnected themes: industrial-scale composite manufacturing, sustainability through engineering, and manufacturing readiness across increasingly demanding supply chains.
Rather than concentrating solely on material performance, PRF is addressing one of the industry's most pressing challenges: how to make advanced composites viable for higher-volume production. Vincent Fawcett discussed the importance of rapid-cure prepreg technologies, press-moulding solutions and manufacturing processes capable of supporting faster cycle times while maintaining the performance advantages that have made composites indispensable in aerospace, automotive and other high-value sectors.
Sustainability formed a second major pillar of the discussion. PRF continues to advance the integration of recycled carbon fibre into both component and tooling applications while pursuing manufacturing approaches designed to reduce energy consumption and lower the carbon footprint per part produced. The interview highlights how the company is attempting to combine circularity, productivity and engineering performance within a unified development strategy.
A further topic explored was manufacturing readiness. Through services such as precision cutting, kitting, material preparation and logistics support, PRF increasingly positions itself as a manufacturing partner rather than simply a material supplier. Extended out-life prepregs and new storage solutions are helping customers simplify operations and improve production efficiency.
The interview also provides insight into PRF's extensive 2026 industry engagement programme. Following JEC World, the company will participate and play prominent roles at two key UK industry events.
At Advanced Engineering UK in Birmingham, PRF serves as a major partner of the composites programme, supporting technical forums and networking activities. At the International Composites Summit in Wembley, the company has been named Exclusive Forum Headline Sponsor, underlining its growing influence within the UK and international composites community.
YouTube Episode: https://youtu.be/2HLwXtq3Tzc
At JEC World 2026 in Paris, Composites Lounge spoke with Vincent Fawcett of PRF Composite Materials about the forces currently reshaping the composites industry and the company's role in helping manufacturers navigate this transition.
The conversation revealed a clear strategic focus on three interconnected themes: industrial-scale composite manufacturing, sustainability through engineering, and manufacturing readiness across increasingly demanding supply chains.
Rather than concentrating solely on material performance, PRF is addressing one of the industry's most pressing challenges: how to make advanced composites viable for higher-volume production. Vincent Fawcett discussed the importance of rapid-cure prepreg technologies, press-moulding solutions and manufacturing processes capable of supporting faster cycle times while maintaining the performance advantages that have made composites indispensable in aerospace, automotive and other high-value sectors.
Sustainability formed a second major pillar of the discussion. PRF continues to advance the integration of recycled carbon fibre into both component and tooling applications while pursuing manufacturing approaches designed to reduce energy consumption and lower the carbon footprint per part produced. The interview highlights how the company is attempting to combine circularity, productivity and engineering performance within a unified development strategy.
A further topic explored was manufacturing readiness. Through services such as precision cutting, kitting, material preparation and logistics support, PRF increasingly positions itself as a manufacturing partner rather than simply a material supplier. Extended out-life prepregs and new storage solutions are helping customers simplify operations and improve production efficiency.
The interview also provides insight into PRF's extensive 2026 industry engagement programme. Following JEC World, the company will participate and play prominent roles at two key UK industry events.
At Advanced Engineering UK in Birmingham, PRF serves as a major partner of the composites programme, supporting technical forums and networking activities. At the International Composites Summit in Wembley, the company has been named Exclusive Forum Headline Sponsor, underlining its growing influence within the UK and international composites community.
YouTube Episode: https://youtu.be/2HLwXtq3Tzc
Transkript
So wonderful
good morning, dear
LinkedIn community Composites
Lounge members JEC
Exhibitors and visitors.
Today I'm
at the PRF booth.
PRF composite materials
here in Hall five.
And my
guest today is Vincent Vincent.
Thank you for being part of my show.
Good morning Ilkay.
It's good to see you again.
Vincent, we've met already last year,
and we want to get
some updates from Vincent.
And my first question, Vincent,
is we dive directly into it.
So what's your program in 2026?
What events exhibitions
do you have planned for this year
for your community?
So here we are
at JEC 2026.
Very, very important event for us
- a real showcase event.
It gives us a great opportunity
to work with our European partners
from France, Germany, Italy, Spain.
After this event, we're going to be going to
the aero interiors
at Hamburg, AIX Hamburg, an event
specifically designed
for aircraft interiors.
We have some good business
to conduct with our partners there.
Later on in the year,
we're going to be going to
the NEC
National Exhibition
Center in Birmingham
in the UK for Advanced Engineering.
Again, another very,
very important showcase event for us.
And then after that we have ICS,
which is the International Composites
Summit, which I believe
is going to be
at The Drum in Wembley in London
again, as it was last year.
We'll also be walking
some events this year.
We exhibited at CAMX
last year in Florida,
but we're going to be walking
that event this year.
We've decided to run
that event every other year.
So bi annual and many,
many other events.
There's Goodwood Festival of Speed,
of course,
there's Farnborough Airshow
that will also be going.
Oh yeah.
So we've got a busy program.
It's a busy program.
And that means also that
you really keep the close contact
with your community, right?
It's important. It's important
for us to present
at these events, all of these events
to do exactly that.
We want to keep PRF at the forefront
of all
our customers'
and potential customers'
minds, really.
Is the beauty of this
setup is Vincent,
that once you have this
close contact with your partners,
there's also a strong indication
that you are doing
also customized solutions.
Now we are in front of
the circular village
circularity village of JEC.
JEC.
Now I know that
PRF is of course
in the recycling
and circularity business a lot.
Work us through
your upgrade
this year or update this year
on your circularity
recycling program.
What's what's new?
What have you added
and what's coming up?
What can the community expect
on those?
Well, first,
first of all, it's
a good observation from you.
It's not it's not an accident
that we're next
to the Circularity Village.
Yes, sustainability
is a very big part
of our product
offering and process offering.
What have we done new this year?
Well, we've
built on our sustainability message
over the past couple of years,
which has been centered around
fast curing, curing parts
very, very quickly in a
in a snap cure matrix,
either in the press
or through some very, very fast
autoclave processing and marrying
that with recycled fiber,
the use of recycled fiber.
Again, this is all designed
to lower the carbon footprint
of of your finished part.
This year.
The update is we've started
to include recycled
fiber into our class
leading tooling product,
which is RP800,
which is a composite tooling product.
We've now swapped out
40% of our bulk
plies on this product
for recycled fiber.
So we're bringing sustainability
into what is a commodity product
in composites production in tooling,
which is a very strong,
powerful message to send.
And also because the notion
in particularly
the automotive industry is always, do
composites have enough tech times,
the speed of production,
and now you're bringing this
really to a whole new level.
And this including
even with recycled fibers,
that's really a game changer here.
Well, we feel
we're in a pivotal moment
with composites. Yes.
I mean, composites has been building
as an industry
for many, many years now.
We're looking at in the UK
alone, a 14.5
to 15 million pounds
contribution to the UK economy.
We're looking at a huge employer
getting upwards of 100,000 people
working in that industry alone.
So we're talking
about a really powerful piece
in the UK economic jigsaw puzzle.
How do we move forward with that?
High volume part
Manufacture is central to that.
High volume part
production is central to that.
The industrialization
of composites is central to that.
So making parts
very, very quickly,
we need to really compete
with the metallics industry
and the plastic injection
molding industry.
And that means getting our processes
to the point
where we can make hundreds,
if not thousands of parts
very quickly
at a low energy footprint,
low energy cost per part.
It's a dream.
When I hear it.
I'm thinking of my previous career,
where we had cut parts
from textiles for diesel
particulate filters
that went into hundreds
of thousands of parts.
Yeah,
and this is actually, in the end,
the state we have to achieve.
Right.
Really the large production.
Exactly that.
I mean, this is when automotive,
we really jump into it.
And it comes through innovation
in materials.
It comes through
innovation in processing.
And we're in that pivotal moment.
Right.
It's an exciting time
to be in composites right now
because we're right
in that pivotal moment.
We're not alone.
You know,
we have our fiber manufacturers
making leaps forward
with different sources
for raw materials.
We have some wonderful innovation
in resin formulations
where we're adding some fantastic
techniques to
prepregging process
to make materials faster.
And of course, processing
the materials into parts.
You know,
we're looking at hybrid solutions
through maximizing the
use of an auto clave
and a press.
So you can you can,
you can look at your parts
and say, right, we need a lot of very
small parts in high volume.
So that's suited to to press molding.
To match molding.
We also need to make some very
large structural
volume parts.
And that that lends itself
to auto clave processing.
And what we're seeing from
a lot of our customers
is this kind of hybrid solution for
for processing.
Now, Vincent, now let's dive
a bit into the technical side.
So one of my passions
is of course, then how do we engineer
parts with composites.
You've always these visual parts.
You have structural parts.
Then you have the car
manufacturing.
You have the vehicles of highway
or trucks.
Do we have an application for us
where you could run us through
the entire
R&D process,
the research, development,
how does it work with the customer?
Do you have an example for us?
Yes, yes I can
I can give you an example.
We have a partner that we work
with that
make niche vehicle
interiors.
So a very highly visual
quality part.
A lot of parts go into
in the interiors.
There's lots and lots of different
panels, lots of support structures
behind those panels.
So we take some high
quality visual prepreg.
Yes.
Well dry fiber and we
prepreg that
to a correct resin weight.
We then
put that on our cutting tables.
We have a kitting facility.
We cut out hundreds of parts,
arrange those
and label them and put them into kits
ready for processing.
And we send these kits off to this.
So you make logistics also very easy.
Absolutely.
So it's just
in time delivery. Just in sequence delivery.
Is a good phrase to use.
Yes, it's a good phrase to use.
I like to use the phrase
material readiness.
Our customer needs to be focusing
on making the parts, doing what
they're very good at,
you know,
focusing on their strengths.
And we as the prepreg
manufacturer,
we're really a service company.
Yes, we're a manufacturer of prepreg,
but really we're about service.
We're about being just in time,
making sure that our customer
can focus on their strength,
which is making their parts.
So we remind the community,
prepregs have a shelf life.
They have a
chain
of cool temperature
to be stayed there.
Although you have solutions
which have a longer shelf life,
you need to be always fresh
in this material, right?
So that's essential.
It fits into our sustainability
model.
It also fits into flexibility
of processing and storage
of materials for our customers.
So yeah, we offer prepregs
that have for instance
our fast curing
prepreg for press molding and fast
autoclave curing has a 90
day out life at ambient temperature.
That's really useful.
It also stores
for 12 months at five degrees.
Five degrees is
refrigerator temperature.
The energy cost between refrigerator
and -18 for the freezer
is a massive,
massive difference.
So 12 months at five degrees,
that's a really important
leap forward.
But then we also have a new product
that we're launching this year
called RP5365.
And that gives you
12 months out life.
So 12 months at ambient temperature.
You don't need to refrigerate
or freeze this prepreg.
You can hold it
at ambient temperature
measured at 20 degrees for 12 months.
We will shortly walk
through your booth.
You have some parts here.
Just explain us.
What kind of parts do you have
on your boots today at JEC World.
We try to have
a good cross-section of parts
to show all our products, showcase
all our products.
Over to my left here
we have some business
jet aircraft interior
parts for business
jet seats.
This looks like a business class
rear seat type.
It's business jet,
not business class.
So yeah, it's business jet.
So the regional jets
like the Gulf streams or Bombardier.
Yeah.
That would be a good example.
Yes.
It's below
a certain amount of passengers.
So it has a slightly – six
seaters, nine seaters, 12 seaters -
So it has a slightly lower
fire-resistant rating.
But we have this.
These parts are made
from recycled fiber.
Okay.
They're press molded in six minutes.
As you can see
they're quite large area parts
with a lot of detail to them.
I can imagine it's comfortable.
See it there.
There's I think 36
parts goes into this seat
and our customers able
to produce these very, very quickly.
Perfect.
This is perfect that I see this
because I'm looking for materials.
I will be at the AERO
Friedrichshafen show
on April
22nd, 23, 24.
And I'm always constantly
looking for parts
in the business jet,
so that's really cool
and comes handy.
Yeah,
I will take that to
Aero Friedrichshafen.
That's very kind of you.
Over here
we have some examples of tooling
using our 1-8-1 layup
RP800 class
leading tooling system.
There's also a 1-5-1 layer up there
which is our brand name
Q.tool for quick tooling.
Five bulk plies
so much much faster to go down.
And then over here
we have another example of tooling.
But this incorporates
the 40% of recycled
fiber in the bulk plies.
So this is a little bit
more sustainability
in tooling as well.
So they're the main parts
that we're showing here.
We do have some
very impressive parts here
that are hexagonal core
sandwich panels.
And these are showcasing
a really high visual finish
from our press
molding
and the quality of our resin
film adhesive.
The bonding quality of our resin
film adhesive,
which bonds at the same rate
as our press molding prepreg.
So we have an adhesive film
that will cure in four minutes
with our
RP570 prepreg.
onto hexagonal core.
So that was
really pretty much covered
all what is PRF standing for.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
We met already on a regular basis
and I'm looking forward to meet you
again and again and again.
And every time we have a new update.
So our community knows about
where the composite
industry is trending to,
we find the facts on the ground.
Thank you so much for all your work
and your support
for these organizations
and the networking.
You understand yourself
not only as a manufacturer,
but you are really an important part.
It's very kind.
Playing a part.
So thank you so much one more time.
Otherwise, I will
thank you and wish you
a good rest of the show.
It's always a pleasure.
Thank you, thank you.