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Photo/Vought Aircraft Industries
An aft fuselage of what will eventually be a new Boeing 787 Dreamliner gets a few finishing touches at the Vought Aircraft Industries plant in North Charleston.
By Dan McCue
The composites industry has been around since man mixed straw with mud to make a brick. Seeking the perfect recipe, technicians and engineers have over the decades blended materials in hopes of producing products that are stronger, more efficient and better than the original materials were on their own.
While today’s composite products have become more sophisticated than brick and straw, the end result is the same. And the growth in manufacturing with composite materials in South Carolina is “huge,” said Lauren McCaughey, project manager of technical services for the Arlington, Va.-based American Composites Manufacturers Association.
“While diversification and the seasonal nature of some composite applications make tracking the industry from quarter to quarter difficult, from a broader perspective composites are by far one of the fastest-growing segments in the manufacturing sector in South Carolina,” she said.
To most of those outside the industry, the mention of composites in South Carolina conjures up a single image these days: Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner and the large, co-located facilities in North Charleston—one belonging to Vought Aircraft Industries, the other to Global Aeronautica—that are playing a critical role in creating the aircraft.
“There’s no question, the 787 is the crème de la crème of the industry,” said Gordon Brown, a consultant to the Palmetto State’s composites industry.
But as great as the project is, generating hundreds of high-paying jobs and placing the Lowcountry at the forefront of the use of composites in the commercial aviation sector, it’s still something of a Johnny-come-lately.
In some parts of the state, notably those home to recreational watercraft manufacturers like Sea-Pro Boats in Newberry or CoMar Products Inc., which manufactures “cultured marble” and other custom home products in Columbia, composites are an old vocation.
What’s more, the incorporation of woven composite fibers into an increasing number of products ranging from custom, rot-proof architectural trim to power boats to advanced resins appears to be reviving the state’s moribund textile industry, said Bill Mahoney, president of the South Carolina Research Authority.
“One of the things the S.C. (Council on Competitiveness) guys did awhile back was a survey of what many consider the ‘remnants’ of the state’s historic textile industry. What they discovered was a migration by older companies out of cotton wovens and into the realm of woven glass and other synthetic fibers and even into nonwoven materials,” Mahoney said.
“A lot of people thought that industry sector was dead. What really appears to have happened is a restructuring of the industry. Companies that specialized in the older technologies are morphing into admittedly leaner, but also more nimble technologists for the next generation, working with carbon-based or noncarbon-based polymers.”
One of those companies is ISO Poly Films Inc. of Gray Court, which Mahoney described as “a third-generation molding business” when its CEO, Jon McClure, began transforming it into an industry leader in providing plastic films for the laminating, printing, coating and converting markets.
“Basically he was doing what all good businessmen do; he was responding to market factors,” Mahoney said. “Instead of stubbornly staying in a market that was declining, he licensed intellectual property developed at Clemson University and has prospered.”
While Mahoney declined to make a pronouncement about the scope of such activities in the state, he said ISO Poly’s development and success is not atypical of the kinds of things he’s seen come out of Clemson’s Composite Consortium, a program SCRA chairs.
“I also think the (U.S.) Navy’s establishment of a composites manufacturing technology center has been a big, big plus and has been an enormous contributor to composites research in the state,” Mahoney said.
The future of that research can be summed up in a single word: “sustainability,” Mahoney said.
“I think as composite-based products become less expensive and proliferate even more as a result, there’s going to be a recognition that we need to manage the entire lifecycle of these products from raw materials manufacturing to the creation of a final product to how those products are recycled once their viable life is over,” he said.
“That’s something researchers at Clemson and the Noisette Urban Alliance are looking at; it could be that the recycling of this material can work hand-in-hand with efforts to find sources of alternative energy.”
The NUA, an offshoot of the Noisette development being carved out of the grounds of the former Charleston Naval Base site, is a coalition of 15 of the world’s leading planet-friendly manufacturers focusing on the issue of sustainable manufacturing.
“Personally, I see a profound potential connection between composites, alternative energy and sustainability, and with it comes a wealth of commercial opportunity,” Mahoney said.
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