On October 14, Arris Composites, a pioneer in the next generation of composite materials, announced that its Additive Manufacturing Moulding™ carbon fiber truss won the Red Dot: Design Concept 2020 Award. Arris's first carbon fiber truss doubled the specific stiffness of I-beam, while also increasing material advantages such as corrosion resistance and the opportunity to integrate functions into the structure.
Thanks to Arris' innovative Additive Moulding manufacturing process, it is also 100% recyclable and highly expandable in size and quantity. Arris' breakthrough process combines additive manufacturing with traditional high-volume molding technology to produce a continuous carbon fiber composite material that can be combined with other materials such as metals and even electronics.
“Carbon fiber is one of the highest performance materials currently available, but the high-cost manufacturing process limits it to extreme performance applications such as airplanes and premium cars,” explained Ethan Escowitz, CEO and founder of Arris Composites. "Our truss demonstrates how the additive molding process can provide optimized composite materials for applications in different industries such as consumer electronics and sporting goods, aerospace and automotive under mass production and cost control. It can be recognized by Red Dot It’s an honor for us.” Speaking of the work done at Arris, Escowitz continued, “Behind this achievement is an amazing team, including two central contributors to this multi-year development effort: the general manager of Arris Engineer Erick Davidson and process development leader Scott Perkins."
About Red Dot: Design Concept Award
Design Concept is the world's largest professional design concept competition. The award is an international jury composed of experts from different fields, and is a fair, recognized and undisputed benchmark for creativity and design excellence in the industry. The conference invites designers, design teams, companies, design studios and universities from all over the world to submit prototypes, marketable products, new ideas and design concepts to evaluate and test their designs. This year, 4170 entries from 52 countries were submitted, and only 5.5% of the entries received red dots.
About truss structure
Compared with simple I-beams and other extruded shapes, truss structures have more applications because they can be optimized for a wider range of load situations in applications such as wind turbines, airplanes, automobiles, scooters, and sporting goods .
Although trusses can be seen everywhere in large-scale infrastructure (the best structural design prevails), their applications in transportation are limited. The reason is the high cost associated with the truss manufacturing process and the additional waste burden associated with these traditional processes. Additive molding can realize complex high-performance structures (such as trusses) in the strongest and lightest materials, and has the output and cost required for mass production.
About additive manufacturing
For structurally demanding applications, such as the aerospace and automotive industries, additive manufacturing modeling mimics how to arrange to gain strength and align the fibers in the designer's topology to optimize the use of high-performance continuous fiber composites.
Additive manufacturing allows designers to align glass and carbon fiber along the loading path in complex three-dimensional parts. Fibers can also be precisely aligned around attachment features, and the optimized composite material can be applied to advanced part design on a large scale.
About Arris Composites
Arris Composites, a leading American manufacturing pioneer, uses innovative manufacturing technology and material science to break through, design and manufacture the highest performance composite products. Arris combines a unique additive manufacturing process with high-volume molding, and cooperates with the world's most innovative companies to jointly imagine, design and manufacture the future.