SAERTEX® and Brødrene Aa win JEC Innovation Award for sustainable carbon ship
Saerbeck/Paris - SAERTEX has been awarded the prestigious JEC Innovation Award 2017 in the "Better Living" category for its "Vision of the Fjords" sightseeing boat, which was developed in collaboration with Brodrene Aa and two other partners and is made almost entirely of carbon. The project team will receive the award on March 15, 2017 during a ceremony at JEC World 2017 in Paris, the world's most important trade fair for the composites industry.
The sightseeing ship from Brødrene Aa, which was built using SAERTEX carbon fiber fabrics, is forward-looking in several respects: the hull and superstructure are largely made of carbon. In addition, the resulting weight savings of up to 50 percent made the sensible use of a hybrid drive possible in the first place, leading to a reduction in emissions of more than 20 percent. In addition to SAERTEX, the two project partners DIAB International AB and Reichhold LLC were also honored as co-award winners.
SAERTEX customer Brødrene Aa developed a ship that is used in Europe's longest and deepest fjord to reconcile mass tourism and nature. 90 percent of the CO2 emissions generated during the life cycle of a ship are produced during the operation of the vessel. This is precisely where the companies and engineers involved in the development of the "Vision Of The Fjords" came in, combining an energy-saving lightweight catamaran design using light and durable materials and the use of environmentally friendly propulsion technology. Where steel and aluminum structural components were previously used, carbon materials were now employed. The basis was multiaxial carbon fiber fabrics from SAERTEX, whose fiber orientation and number of layers were individually adapted for this project depending on the component requirements. Depending on the mechanical requirements, unidirectional, biaxial, triaxial and quadraxial fabrics were used for the "Vision Of The Fjords".
The technical highlight and biggest challenge of this project was the production of the carbon hull elements. These 41-meter-long and 5-meter-high components were impregnated in one piece using a vacuum infusion process with a special resin. To achieve this, it was necessary to keep the permeability of the fabric in the mold as high as possible. The SAERTEX development team had optimized the flow properties of the combination of carbon fiber fabric and vinyl ester resin in the laboratory. This, together with the decades of expertise of Brødrene Aa's employees, ultimately led to the successful completion of the project,„ said Dietmar Möcke, member of the management board and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of SAERTEX.
The "Vision Of The Fjords" has been in operation on the 32-kilometre route between the ports of Flåm and Gudvangen since July 2016. Around 700 trips are planned each year. On the most scenic part of the passage, the "Vision Of The Fjords" glides almost silently through the fjord landscape at 10 knots using only electric propulsion, allowing tourists to experience nature in an impressive way. The shipping company The Fjords AS has already ordered further ferries of the same design.
The Vision of the Fjord had already received the prestigious Norwegian "Ship Of The Year 2016" award at the leading international trade fair for the maritime industry, SMM in Hamburg, in September 2016.
"We are very proud and delighted to receive this award. It is confirmation and an incentive for our company to work together with our customers on pioneering developments that conserve our world's resources. Carbon is the material of the future and will prevail in all applications in the transportation sector," says Christoph Geyer, Member of the Management Board and Chief Sales Officer (CSO) of SAERTEX.
SAERTEX also supported this year's winner of the JEC Innovation Award in the „Automotive Structural“ category by supplying lightweight materials as a project partner: SAERTEX supplied the appropriate multiaxial fabrics for the development of an automotive structural component manufactured using the thermoplastic resin transfer molding (T-RTM) process by Forward Engineering in Munich.
SAERTEX has been nominated for the JEC Innovation Award many times in recent years and has received awards for its innovative solutions. In 2014, SAERTEX received the award in the „Wind Power“ category for a process that enables the production of rotor blades for wind turbines to be further automated using new manufacturing systems.
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