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Welcome to dark matter composites blog

Clever Design

21/1/2016

3 Comments

 
Carbon fibre gets used for a lot these days,  sometimes it’s for all the right reasons & it’s designed and fabricated well, other times it’s not.  Here at Dark Matter Composites we love looking at new and fun developments in the world of composites, as well as the more serious stuff.  This week's caught our eye and is well worth a look, particularly if you (are old enough to) remember the excitement about VTOL on the Harrier, (or nerdy enough) to love Science fiction or play with remote control models.

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Disney uses carbon fibre to create wall-climbing robot

https://www.disneyresearch.com/publication/vertigo/

https://youtu.be/KRYT2kYbgo4


In particular we loved the two tilt-able propellers that provide thrust to propel it on horizontal and vertical surfaces.  It's nimble and lightweight design made us wonder what it's future applications may be, especially as can it travel along ceilings upside down.

Then we started analysing the design, with comments like 'what a lot of excess carbon fibre, fixtures and fittings!'   Rodney is sure he could loose half of it, in particular, make the suspension in a single sprung piece, use a little bit of core on the motor mounts and rings.... you get the picture.  Although he did have special commendation for the controls/software engineers.



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New Year Weight Loss?

15/1/2016

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It's that time of year again where seasonal over indulgence has knowingly reached a peak and under indulgence (diet, dry January?) is the most common thought each time your open the fridge or freezer - except if your freezer is full of rolls of pre-preg!

January is one of the few times in the year when we get to revamp our facilities prior to the onslaught of back to back courses.  A quick check of our walk-in pre-preg freezer has just reminded me of how many unusual projects we were involved in last year, especially as we have more stock of unusual project specific material than our standard pre-preg.

Most of this is due to the number of training and consultancy projects we took on that involved training ourselves and others in using unusual materials.

The most notable being the use of North Thin Ply Technology's very lightweight uni-directional materials to produce some complex prototype parts.  When we placed the order for the materials, we were aware that the material was commonly used with tape laying machines, but we had to lay up complex parts by hand.  It was lightweight UD so how bad could it be?  Before we knew it, tooling was produced and the materials arrived, then the fun began!  An initial play with 40gsm carbon and 26gsm quartz UD left us thinking 'how the hell are we going to do this?' especially when you can barely see the 26gsm quartz UD on white backing paper. 


Having clean white well lit workshops suddenly proved to be a big disadvantage, so in typical composite engineering fashion, we started to to experiment...
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    This blog is written by a few of us here at dark Matter composites:
    Rodney
    Rosemary
    Paul
    Sharon
    A brief introduction is on it's way...........


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UPCOMING COURSES

DMSC60, Producing Your Own Composite Parts
12-16 May 2025


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9-13 June  2025


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16-20 June  2025

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