KARL MAYER Technische Textilien GmbH successfully showcased high-tech machines for the composites sector at the JEC composites show, which was held from 12 to 14 March 2019 in Paris. “The mood was upbeat, the number of visitors was high, and I had many in-depth, technical conversations with existing customers and also with people expressing a new interest,” says Jochen Schmidt, the Managing Director of KARL MAYER Technische Textilien GmbH. The many technical discussions held with partners from Europe and the USA, as well as India and China, helped to contribute to the successful outcome. The discussions related to specific projects, plans and trends. According to Jochen Schmidt, a general trend away from simple lightweight construction technology towards components having integrated functions could be detected. The costs of increasing performance by using fibre-reinforced composite materials, especially when using carbon, are only justified for the most demanding applications. This managing director and his team had many conversations with suppliers to niche markets on the possibilities offered by the COP MAX 5. This multiaxial warp knitting machine for processing carbon scores points mainly because of its unbeatable productivity and excellent product quality.

On the other hand, the glass composites sector, with its competitive raw materials prices, continues to gain momentum. The driver of this demand continues to be the wind turbine sector, and increasingly industrial applications as well. A great deal of interest was also being shown in the COP MAX 4, an efficient multiaxial warp knitting machine for processing glass.

Dr. Jürgen Trötzsch, the Section Head of New Technologies at KARL MAYER Technische Textilien, was pleased to report that the sector is increasingly focusing on the topic of thermoplastic materials. He and his team have developed a line for producing thermoplastic UD tapes. They will launch this new innovation at ITMA 2019, but they had already started to arouse people’s curiosity about it at the JEC. “This line was the topic of many conversations. Some visitors came to gather information, while others had specific queries about the machinery, but they were all impressed by the quality of our tapes,” says Dr. Jürgen Trötzsch. This new line is the result of many years of expertise gained by the company in spreading technology. It guarantees a unique, homogeneous distribution of uniform, straight fibres, and thus delivers maximum potential for the lightweight engineering sector.