JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #83 - August/September 2013 - 38

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Personal Safety

All-composite anchors for personal fall arrest systems
The anchors and adjusters used in safety
harnesses to maintain the straps are traditionally made of aluminium and steel. The
main drawback of such anchors is their
electrical conductivity, weight and low corrosion resistance. This innovation concerns
a novel all-composite anchor design for
security harnesses.
In this application, electric insulation,
corrosion resistance and weight saving are
the key properties that make composite
materials the ideal solution. In order to
develop the new all-composite anchors,
several challenges were progressively
solved, starting with a 3-dimensional weaving of the fibres, a new resin formulation,
an innovative manufacturing process and,
finally, the design and certification of the
different anchors.
Treated glass fibre tows were seen as the
best solution for this application due to
their electrical insulation, good impact

properties and low cost. To minimize
friction, most mobile parts were covered
with Teflon®, and the mandrel was mirrorpolished and thermally treated to increase
its surface hardness.
It was decided to develop an in-house
formulation based on a high-temperature
polyester resin. The polyester-based resin
was mixed with liquid rubbers in order
to improve its impact performance at low
temperature. A special “gyroscopic filament
winding” system was then developed for
producing filament-wound connecting
components from fibre tows simultaneously in two orthogonal patterns.
The process selected for manufacturing
these composite parts was Resin Transfer Moulding (RTM). Optimized RTM
moulds with multiple cavities for highvolume production were used.
Pre-production of the innovative composite anchors is presently on-going at Go

A tooling solution that thoroughly evacuates
hot dust particles during cutting operations
By air cooling the material and cutter effectively, the Aerotech® System significantly
reduces machining temperatures. This
allows manufacturers of composite parts
to consider dry cutting their components,
providing a practical alternative to machining with coolants. Ever since composites
became an important manufacturing
material, aerospace, automotive and companies alike have lived with the following
problem: hot dust particles created while
dry cutting composites. The only method
available to solve this problem was to
“wet-cut”, using coolants fluids which have
an impact on health and water resources.
A new idea was developed in 2006: using
a turbine similar to that of a jet engine to
draw in air, cool the cutter and material,
and evacuate the hot dust particles created
while machining. Aerotech® changed its

Winner: Go Composites (Colombia)
Partnership Network: Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal (Canada), BASF
Chile (Chile), Universidad Pontificia
Bolivariana (Colombia)

Composites after receiving a firm request
from Capital Safety to introduce the first
ever made composite safety harness in
2013. The new product should be officially
launched in the first months of 2014.

Innovation Spreading

shape over the following years and the fluid
dynamics were notably improved. Any
company producing composite parts on
CNC machinery can now dry cut their
components, making their production
process more environmentally friendly and
saving on energy costs. They can manufacture their composite parts without delamination, achieve lower roughness values,
and gain better tool life from their cutters.
The Aerotech® System also facilitates the
removal of debris at the point of cut. In routing operations that employ a nested-based
process, the Aerotech® System is capable of
extracting over 97.4% of all airborne particulates and thereby dramatically increase
production throughput by reducing postcycle clean-up time. The Aerotech® System
extracts debris from the point of cut, thereby reducing the time required for manual

38 jec composites magazine / No83 August - September 2013

Winner: FS Cruing Diamond/ FS Tool
(Canada)
Partnership Network: Cruing Italy SRL
(Italy)

vacuuming debris and dust. It also reduces
the number of tool changes by extending
the cutting tools’ edge life. This is achieved
by air cooling the cutting tool and reducing
the number of times that chips/debris are
re-cut. It is more environmentally friendly,
avoids health problems linked to cutting
fluids, and saves energy because it runs on
passive energy.

JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #83 - August/September 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #83 - August/September 2013