JEC Group, a world organization exclusively dedicated to the composites industry, has announced the 10 winners of its prestigious 2014 JEC Americas Innovation Awards program, which highlights the most pivotal advances in composites design, manufacturing and application. JEC will recognize the ten winning companies and their innovation partners during the third annual JEC Americas exhibition at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. The organization is the largest composites industry organization in the world with a network of 250,000 professionals.
Owens Corning proposed an innovative glass fabric for WINDnovation’s blade designs, optimizing the use of OC’s newly developed Ultrablade unidirectional and multiaxial glass reinforcement fabrics.
Since its launch in 1998, JEC’s Innovation Awards program has recognized over 700 companies and their partners throughout the world at ceremonies in Paris, Shanghai, Mumbai, Singapore, and Boston for their industry-leading contributions toward improving composites technology and enhancing value for end-users. “The American market has traditionally been at the forefront of composites in terms of manufacturing and innovation. The Americas continue to be a key engine for innovation, investment, and the commercialization of cutting-edge composites technology. The U.S. is a key geography for the global composites industry because it represents about a third of its value, $22.5 billion on an overall of $70 billion,” said Mrs. Frédérique Mutel, President and CEO of JEC Group. “The JEC Innovation Awards Program continues to identify and celebrate the top innovators from the Americas and abroad to help fulfill JEC’s mission to share the latest industry advances with the global composites community. From environmentally friendly bio-based resins to cutting-edge personal protection to innovative musical applications to integrated software and preforming processes, the products and technologies highlighted in this year’s competition are incredibly rich and varied.” For this year’s award’s program, JEC compared applications from dozens of international companies for recognition in ten competitive categories, including Automation, Automotive, Ballistics, Construction, Processing, Raw Materials, Reinforcements, Software, Sports & Leisure and Wind Energy. Reflecting JEC Group’s 20-year history of dedicated support for this region’s vibrant composites industry, the JEC Americas Exhibition & Conference is the only composites event that brings together leaders from the full spectrum of the global composites value chain, upstream and down. This year, JEC Group will leverage its new relationship with Messe Frankfurt, Inc. to co-locate the JEC Americas Exhibition & Conference with Messe Frankfurt’s Techtextil North America and Texprocess Americas shows, giving visitors a rare opportunity to attend all three events at once. The 2014 Innovation Awards Program is actively supported by JEC Magazine and Aviation Week. JEC www.jeccomposites.com JEC Americas Innovation Awards 2014 Wind Energy Category Winner: Owens Corning (France) Innovative wind turbine blades manufactured with glass fabrics Partner:WINDnovation (Germany) To improve the cost of energy, a key parameter in modern wind turbine design, they must be manufactured cost effectively and have a long life cycle. The design of lighter wind turbine blades requires less material and smaller support structures, which helps to reduce costs. In addition, more energy can be produced with an existing generator if the blade delivers more torque with little wind, or if the turbine can run longer at stronger wind speeds. Better fatigue properties of the materials also result in a longer product lifetime. To deliver the technology for blade innovation, Owens Corning (OC) proposed innovative glass fabric solutions for WINDnovation’s blade designs, optimizing the use of OC’s newly developed Ultrablade unidirectional and multiaxial glass reinforcement fabric range. The stiffness and strength of the new reinforcement were improved by more than 15%. On a global level, wind turbine generators with a nominal electrical generation capacity of more than 45 GW are built and installed annually. The estimated amount of glass reinforcements for these machines is over 300,000 tons, of which a large portion is unidirectional fabric.
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