In the right applications, composites are perfect to address decarbonisation challenges, with low mass, excellent mechanical performance and especially for thermoplastic composites, low embedded carbon and ease of re-use, remanufacturing, and recycling.

Lack of materials data, equipment, and methods are preventing the UK from benefiting from leading edge, wholly UK manufactured composites. A designer can, at the click of a mouse, obtain accurate data that will simulate how their product will perform if made from say steel or aluminium. In many applications a glass or carbon fibre composite could be a better choice, but the designer would never know, because they can't easily simulate performance.

Composite Braiding Ltd (CBL) is unique in using an innovative combination of materials and processes to offer structural composites at higher volumes and lower prices, with better environmental credentials than has ever been historically available.

A wide range of market sectors (including automotive, rail, aerospace, maritime, infrastructure and leisure) are in desperate need of lightweight, yet strong and resilient materials with low carbon footprints to meet performance and environmental targets. CBL was founded to address these needs.

Any competent test house can accurately test standard coupons. This is suitable for metals, but not always sufficient and possible for characterising composite products. To a far greater degree than metals, the shape and architecture of a composite component defines its properties, so a tensile test of a composite dogbone is not representative of the tensile strength of say, a composite tube.

With NPL's expertise we aim to characterise a range of components of different geometries (something that is not available 'off-the-shelf', and requires capabilities like those of NPL), with different materials and layups. Components will be carefully selected to represent as wide a range of final products as possible, e.g. a 35mm round tube would be a reasonable basis for bike frames, grab poles, automotive chassis components and many others. We will compare these results to standard coupon tests and raw materials data and use modelling techniques to ascertain the relationship between them to form a basis for more accurate simulation of part performance and support product assurance from coupon testing in future -- this is not currently available, as such this approach is innovative. Ultimately the same end point of accurate simulation could potentially be reached via high-end digital-twinning packages, but this is still dependent on the data and validation that we are seeking here.