More efficient fibres

The Taenia Tec team led by Jan Giesbrecht has developed a new generation of unidirectional high performance tapes and foils, consisting of liquid-crystalline polymers, combing high stiffness and strength with outstanding barrier and mechanical damping properties. These new foils enable a wide range of new cost-effective products, from thinner (green) food packaging to high-performance composites.

Conventional long-fibre reinforced composites typically consist of 40 vol% matrix material. This is drastically reduced by replacing round fibres with Taenia Tec’s flat, high-performance tapes, thus creating structures with improved mechanical properties on a per weight basis.

Additionally, unidirectional foils, produced with the new process using VectraLCP, can be bonded without adhesive, yielding monoliths with superior mechanical and barrier properties. Lastly this newly developed foil-making process is performed with standard melt processing equipment and is, thus cost-effective.

The Jury of >>venture>> says about the project: “Taenia Tec’s solution meets a customer need for the development of more efficient fibres with enhanced material properties. It’s a highly competitive market, yet with its excellent technology team Taenia Tec is likely to be able to “attack” in different industries and to serve very different clients. The co-development of projects of a few applications together with end-customers could help gain market proof of the technology so they could ultimately address large-scale companies with it.”