National Composites Centre and Bristol Composites Institute

To store Hydrogen for commercial aerospace applications, it must be cooled to cryogenic temperatures so that it condenses to a liquid and occupies less space.

Therefore, as well as being strong and lightweight, the containers for storing cryogenic Hydrogen must be made out of materials that prevent these tiny Hydrogen molecules from leaking at very low, and cyclically varying, temperatures.

This collaboration, led by Matt Kay at the National Composites Centre and Lui Terry at the University of Bristol, will develop methods that subject strong, lightweight carbon fibre composites to these temperatures, and assess how easily Hydrogen can permeate through the material - with a view of moving towards a widely-adopted standard.

Lineat and iCOMAT are two prominent success stories from the NCC/BCI partnership.

Both are spinouts from patents developed in BCI research that have subsequently received input and support from the NCC via its Technology Pull-Through and Core Programmes, and more.

Collaboration is central to this Bristol success story, where the materials science and process design expertise at the University met the industrialisation and scale-up required to make an impact at the NCC.

Both startups are going strong, with Lineat's phase 3 machine producing pilot-scale material in NCC's Filton facility, and iCOMAT on the brink of supplying their novel automated layup machines enabling defect-free fibre steering process.

The potential to combine the HiPerDiF and Continuous Tow Shearing technologies, that underpin the spin-outs, was previously demonstrated at BCI within a feasibility study funded by the EPSRC Future Composites Manufacturing Research Hub.

Now the NCC Core Programme has brought them together, to lay up Lineat's highly-aligned discontinuous fibre tapes with iCOMAT’s novel fibre steering process - with a view to unlocking the use of recycled material for a wider variety of products - together reducing weight, cost and environmental impact.

The NCC and BCI are both part of the European research project, D-STANDART.

The aim of D-STANDART is to develop efficient methods to test and model the durability of large-scale composite structures of any design under realistic conditions, incorporating sustainability and digital methodologies.

Advanced composites play a crucial role in efforts to achieve a carbon-neutral future as enablers of resistant, lightweight and therefore energy-efficient structures, for example, in the aerospace and wind turbine sectors.

To unlock the full potential of composites to reduce structural weight and extend lifetime, thereby reducing environmental impact, the D-STANDART project will tackle the problem from three angles:

• By accelerating the characterisation of the fatigue properties of composite materials.
• By eliminating the need to test each type of lay-up individually.
• By developing the modelling capability to relate the behaviour of large-scale structures with complex geometries and potential manufacturing defects, to the results of coupon tests.