The new facility is expected to ensure that SHD remains flexible, reactive and supportive in the future.
SHD supports customers by providing prepeg materials. Through increasing production capacity, SHD are future proofing its ability to continue supporting its array of customers and bespoke projects
Over the last 15 years, the company has grown into the global business that it is now with four sites across Europe and US, as well as the UK campus spanning five sites. With seven fabric prepreg lines, offering material up to 1500mm wide, 2 uni-directional lines and a further uni-directional line under construction, SHD will continue to support global contracts of any size, for all markets and applications.
“We are so proud to have reached this milestone as a business! Thank you to everyone who has supported us over the last 15 years, our fantastic teams across the Group and our wonderful customers and suppliers,” said Helen and Steve Doughty, owners of SHD Composite Materials.
In November, SHD and Lineat Composites won the Composites UK Innovation in Composite Materials award for their collaborative effort bringing advanced aligned recycled carbon fibre pre-preg materials to the composite market. Lineat is a sustainable technology company with a patented novel, and scalable, manufacturing technology that takes low value carbon fibre waste, and re-aligns them into a new aligned fibre tape that mimics continuous fibres UD material (AFFT).
Since signing a head of terms in 2023, the companies’ have combined their expertise and capabilities in a flexible solution for manufacturing recycled aligned carbon fibre tape.
Lineat has developed a new dry format of its aligned fibre material, stabilising it with a proprietary binder technology to make it spoolable under tension. SHD used its advanced machinery to feed and combine the aligned fibre tapes into a wider and thicker aligned fibre prepreg material.
This joint effort is said to open up a new route for recycled carbon fibre prepreg production at different thickness, width and with a variety of resin films to meet customer demands.
