JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #97 - Special JEC Americas - May/June 2015 - 30

awards
Antenna-friendly, tough and artistically-designed
cases for the mobile industry
The first innovation is a metallized glass
fibre that is a mobile industry first. Either
red or black tinted glass fibre is used to
produce a rear housing with the rich, deep
and reflective appearance of a carbon
composite in a beautiful antenna-friendly
package. The main goals for the metallized
glass fibre are to deliver a rich-looking
woven fibre composite with the reflectivity and depth of a carbon composite
that can be branded as "Kevlar strong"
for Verizon (the leading cellular service
provider in the United States), as well as
deliver a composite stack-up and forming
technology that results in excellent dimensional stability and surface quality (post-

Consumer electronics

forming) to allow both a soft-feel (black)
and low-gloss (red) cosmetic painting.
The second innovation is a ballistic
nylon, which brings the look and feel of
premium luggage to the mobile industry.
But the result is not a mere soft-sided case
protecting electronic components,
it is reinforced with an industry-first
metallized Kevlar and PC composite
that is both antenna friendly and as
tough as steel. The finished products
deliver two unique thermoplastic
composite laminates advertised as
"Kevlar strong", that combine nylon,
polycarbonate, DuPont Kevlar and
woven glass fibre.

FibreCITY: self-sustainable, high-throughput, comprehensive
fibre grading capability
The core of the FibreCITY project
is to drive the industrial implementation of biocomposites by enabling
control of their quality and consistency, thereby overcoming current
barriers to their widespread use, with
the capacity to evaluate bio-fibres
from multiple agricultural and natural
sources, beginning with flax and
hemp. FibreCITY's unique nature
is its integrated structure; although
numerous instruments are currently
used for fibre grading and characterization, they are non-comprehensive,
non-integrated and are still far from
achieving their full potential. The
project's unique value proposition is
to integrate all of this equipment to
develop a robust and holistic characterization system for natural fibre
properties, and modelling, predicting and optimising their effects
downstream in industrial processes. A
standardized methodology to assess

the sum total of the physical and
biochemical attributes of biofibres, or
"phenome", will thus enable the rapid
assessment and selection of superior
fibre crops, facilitate premiums for
high-quality fibres, assist in maintaining quality (variability) control from
crop to crop, and provide a means
for industry to model and assess the
performance of different biomass processing techniques - creating a new
"intelligent fibre" paradigm.
FibreCITY will manage and mine
its data output (likely in the terabyte range) using a highly specified
laboratory information management
system (LIMS). LIMS is used in
pharmaceutical and other testing laboratories where large volumes of data
are generated in an environment of
strict regulation and quality control.
Using a LIMS will enable FibreCITY
to establish international standardized

30 jec composites magazine / No97 May - June 2015

Winner: Motorola Mobility LLC, a
Lenovo company (USA)
Partners: Roctool (USA), Complam
Material Co., Ltd. (Taiwan), Hollingsworth & Vose Company (USA)
Company (USA)

Biocomposites
Winner: Composites Innovation Center
Manitoba Inc. (Canada)

test methods (e.g. determination
of flax fibre cellulose fibril angle
by polarised Raman spectroscopy)
working through the Composites
Innovation Center's membership on
the ASTM D13.17 committee, giving
a strong North American presence
and through international standards
collaborations, initially with China.
This will put the Canadian industry
in a global-leading position with a
competitive advantage over other
jurisdictions.
JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #97 - Special JEC Americas - May/June 2015

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