New Beacon Program to Lead the Future of Energy Efficiency in Carbon Fiber Processing

Harper International (USA), world leader in thermal processing solutions for advanced materials, announced today the launch of Beacon, a ground-breaking new program offering Carbon Fibre manufacturers the ability to evaluate the carbon footprint of their manufacturing process and identify opportunities for improvement.

With its extensive experience in the industry since the market’s inception, Harper has developed a model that analyses various plant configurations and capacities, precursors, integration scenarios and energy recovery options and ranks the environmental impact of the process line. This endeavour establishes a baseline and a facility-specific metric that can be used to develop improvement plans to drive greater energy recovery and lower operating costs.

“The Carbon Fibre industry is at a critical maturity point where we must focus on achieving greatest output cost effectively with environmental responsibility in order to secure adoption in future market applications such as in automotive,” commented Robert Blackmon, VP of Integrated Systems at Harper.

A new website was also launched as a part of the program. On this site, users can experience the concept of Beacon with a preview survey that evaluates the carbon footprint in a short example model. The complete Beacon model is a complex analysis of over a hundred design parameters. This work expands upon Harper’s previous cost modelling providing insight into the impact of energy efficiency as a part of the overall cost of operations.