Crawford Composites fabricates a wide range of carbon fiber/composite parts, tools, patterns and large scale prototypes to a variety of industries. Prepreg material forms are most commonly used and are cured using oven, autoclave or press processes. Crawford also provides a fair amount of laminate processing of mid to high temperature thermoplastic resins (Nylon to PEEK, PEI, PPS, etc.).
Crawford is proficient at and offers customers the following menu of technical support functions:
- Composite materials and process engineering
- Design for manufacturing and cost
- Composite structures manufacturing technology development
- Structural testing – laminate, element, sub-component, component
- Design of structures and mechanical systems
- Structural analysis via hand calculations and finite element methods
- Dynamic analysis
- Heat transfer analysis via finite element methods
- Rudimentary computational fluid dynamics
- Tooling, pattern and mold design
- In-house CNC mold and tooling fabrication
- Contact and non-contact dimensional inspection
- Machining (for information on outside contract machining click here)
- Full commercial in-house painting
Crawford has the ability to and actively utilizes a wide range of fiber reinforcements for composites including:
- Carbon - standard, medium & high modulus (pan or pitch)
- Aramid - Kevlar49 & Kevlar29 as well as other para-aramids for ballistic protection
- Glass - E-glass, S2-glass
- HDPE - Dynema, Spectra, etc.
- Quartz
Fiber forms include: Unidirectional, Woven, Random Mat
Primarily cure thermoset resins at typical temperatures of: 100-120C, 175C, 225C
Consolidate mid-temperature thermoplastics (Nylon): 225C
Core and interlayer materials include:
- Non-metallic honeycomb - (typically Nomex paper with phenolic or polyimide resin)
- Aluminum honeycomb
- Foam - for structure, radar transmission (radomes) and X-ray clarity (medical imaging)
- Nonwoven fibers - for thermal and acoustic properties (noise and vibration reduction)
- Elastomeric - for vibration damping and noise reduction
- Recycled Carbon Fiber