FILAVA carbon hybrid woven fabric

May 2016. ISOMATEX SA has recently pioneered a new hybrid fabric reinforcement for various high-end composites in the automotive, aircraft, boatbuilding and ballistic industries that uses FILAVA^TM fibres together with 3K high tenacity (HT) carbon fibres (3K HT CARBON).

This new hybrid fabric answers in particular the increasing demand from the automotive and aircraft industries for composite materials and successfully combines all the advantages of FILAVA^TM and 3K HT CARBON fibres. Together they deliver a reinforcement product that improves the high strength-to-weight ratio and dimensional stability while having remarkable properties like high elongation at break, high stiffness, high thermal insulation, high resin wettability (drape-ability), high fatigue resistance and a unique eye-catching colour and pattern when transformed into a composite part.

When combining FILAVA^TM’s impressive characteristics (high tensile strength - higher than 3K HT CARBON -, high elongation at break - 4 times higher than 3K HT CARBON -, high toughness, moderate modulus, low weight, high thermal isolation and dimensional stability, chemical and alkali resistance) with 3K HT CARBON’s own characteristics (high tensile strength, high E-modulus (Young modulus) and very low weight), ISOMATEX SA created a product which maintains the best properties of each fibre and which is ideally suitable for numerous composite structural parts in various applications.

This new hybrid fabric is a flawless solution in particular for the automotive industry’s weight reduction challenges and ever-higher safety requirements especially for structural auto-body parts. This new product will finally warrant the widespread adoption of fibre reinforced composites in the mass-production automotive industry due to its substantially lower cost compare with a carbon-only solution and whose availability is not limited like carbon.