Consulting

LTI’s 20 years of development in advanced composite products has grown an enviable level of expertise across all aspects of design, stress analyses, and manufacturing / producibility. Indeed, more so than with any other class of materials we consider a concurrent engineering approach essential to successful product development. Typically, composite structures are grown on, around or within tooling – occasionally incorporating the tooling into the finished product. In designing the product one also designs the material and these two aspects are inextricably linked. Conventional composite materials comprised of oriented layers or plies are two dimensional by nature with no fiber dominated properties existing through the thickness. Successful designs remember this and avoid large through thickness stress build up when capitalizing on the superb specific performance possible in the plane of the material. LTI has learned on numerous projects how to get it right the first time by linking design for performance with process design and has undertaken this for clients in all industries.

Notable Projects

  • Airframe Development: PRSEUS update: Hybrid wing body passenger cabin takes shape NASA calls on composites to enable a paradigm shift in future aircraft aerodynamics. (CompositesWorld)
  • Utility pole design including interactive software relating geometry, strength, stiffness and process parameters. This resulted in the first successful product line of pultruded utility poles.
  • A new approach to extractive mineralogy, designing rotating equipment for an OEM to separate iron ore tailings with over 99% recovery. LTI continued with prototyping and production of these large, highly stressed composite assemblies with products now located in eight (8) countries and over 300 million tons of ore recovered.
  • Safe Crossings
  • The Dow Chemical Company
  • Ceramic matrix composites concurrent with coupled field Finite Element Analysis (FEA) in the development of Inductively Transparent Induction Furnace Vessels. Solutions were developed for silicon metal processing and for a novel stainless-steel spray coating of structural re-bar.
  • Wastewater treatment reactors for an OEM employing filament wound containment of media used in reducing biochemical oxygen demand prior to discharge into public waterways.
  • Locomotive Radiator cooling fans used for high ambient temperature applications worldwide. Contributions include fluid dynamic design for volumetric flow rate and static pressure, structural optimization, pultrusion of airfoil blades and integral hinge design for operation at 700g.
  • Intramedullary Bone Reamer using carbon fiber to reinforce a flexible elastomeric resin system. This flexible driveshaft replaced helical steel springs in providing bi-directional torque and a clean non-fouling surface for bone marrow removal.
  • Other projects have included composite solutions for hockey sticks, bicycle suspensions, carbon fiber bicycle frames, concrete forms, bed springs and baseball bats.