Arris Composites’ Additive Molding™ Carbon Fiber Truss Wins Red Dot: Design Concept 2020

Berkeley, Calif. — Arris, the pioneer of next-generation composites, today announces that its Additive Molding™ Carbon Fiber Truss won the Red Dot: Design Concept 2020 award. Arris’ first-of-its-kind carbon fiber truss doubles the specific stiffness of a steel I-beam while adding material benefits like corrosion resistance and the opportunity for functional integration into the structure. It is also 100 percent recyclable and highly scalable in size and quantity thanks to Arris’ innovative Additive Molding manufacturing process.

Arris’ groundbreaking process combines additive manufacturing and traditional high-volume molding techniques to produce continuous carbon fiber composites that can be combined with other materials such as metals and even electronics.

Speaking about the work that took place at Arris, Escowitz continues, “Behind this achievement is an amazing team, including two major contributors at the center of this multi-year development effort: Arris’ Chief Engineer, Erick Davidson, and Process R&D Lead, Scott Perkins.”

The Red Dot Award: Design Concept is the largest professional design concept competition in the world. With an international jury consisting of experts from diverse fields, the award serves as a fair, recognized, and indisputable benchmark for creativity and design excellence in the industry. Designers, design teams, companies, design studios, and universities from all over the world are invited to submit prototypes, marketable products, new ideas, and design concepts for evaluation and to put their designs to the test. This year a total of 4,170 entries from 52 countries were submitted with only 5.5 percent of entries winning a Red Dot.

Truss structures have many more applications compared to simple I-beams and other extruded shapes because they can be optimized for a broader set of load scenarios in applications like wind turbines, planes, cars, all the way down to scooters and sporting goods. Trusses, while ubiquitous in large infrastructure (where the best structural designs prevail), have seen limited use in transportation. Reasons for this include the high costs associated with truss manufacturing processes and the additional burden of scrap associated with these conventional processes. Additive Molding makes complex, high-performance structures like trusses possible in the strongest and lightest materials, and with the throughputs and costs required at scale.

Critical for structurally demanding applications, like those in the aerospace and automotive industries, Additive Molding mimics how nature aligns wood grain in a tree for strength and aligns fibers within a designer’s topology to optimally employ high-performance continuous fiber composite materials.

The alignment of wood grains through a tree limb provides the highest structural strength and stiffness. Similarly, Additive Molding allows designers to align glass and carbon fibers along the load paths within a complex 3-dimensional part. The fibers can also be precisely aligned around attachment features (below). For the first time, optimized composites can be applied to advanced part designs at scale.

U.S. advanced manufacturing pioneer Arris Composites leverages novel manufacturing technologies and materials science breakthroughs to enable the design and manufacture of the highest-performance composite products at scale. Combining a unique additive manufacturing process with high-volume molding, Arris partners with the world’s most innovative companies to imagine, design, and manufacture the future. For information, visit arriscomposites.com.