Corekits Enhances Flexibility and Gains Performance Advantages For Wind Blade Manufacturers with TYCOR® W

CoreKits Inc. engineers and produces composite core kits that are used by major wind blade manufacturers and in marine and industrial applications. The Irving, Texas-based company credits its growth to its ability to provide customers with performance and cost advantages through a combination of innovation, process efficiencies and manufacturing expertise. CoreKits products are manufactured under ISO-9001 quality standards. The company’s comprehensive menu of competitively priced materials gives it the flexibility to match the right application with customer requirements for superior solutions.

For one wind blade manufacturer facing shortages in the supply of balsa wood, Corekits’ capabilities and a patented, fiber reinforced composite core provided a solution that eliminated supply constraints and delivered other key advantages. TYCOR® W combines glass fibers with closed-cell, low density foam in an engineered architecture to produce an advanced core solution that is a direct replacement for balsa wood, PVC and SAN foam. The blade manufacturer began working with WebCore Technologies to qualify its TYCOR material and sourced CoreKits to cut and kit the composite core product.

“Proper kitting was critical to WebCore to allow us to demonstrate the full value of TYCOR,” said Scott Campbell, Director, Sales Engineering for WebCore.

“We worked with WebCore to create the prototype,” said Ruben Garcia, President of CoreKits. The first step was to look at our tooling and make some unique modifications to fabricate this fiber composite core material. By changing the sheet size we were also able to improve kitting yield by as much as 10 percent.”

For the blade manufacturer, the larger sheet size reduced the number of core segments necessary to load large turbine blade molds, resulting in fewer core joints and enhanced core fit at adjoining segments. “Other advantages include improved infusion uniformity, blade-to-blade weight consistency and faster installation,” Garcia said. “The larger, lightweight panels made it easier for me to optimize the core kit and pass economies of scale on to the customer,” he added.

CoreKits uses cellular manufacturing and advanced throughput processes to support lean inventory requirements and ensure on-time delivery. “WebCore delivers its TYCOR material just-in-time on a rolling forecast which allows CoreKits and the blade manufacturer to adjust inventory to ongoing production fluctuations without incurring the cost of overstocking inventory,” Garcia said.

The company has also designed its manufacturing processes to give it the agility to perform custom configurations and tailor sheet sizes based on a customer’s design to reduce cost, waste, provide faster assembly and easier installation. “Our flexibility and in-house resources allow us to provide hybrid core kits especially suited to the needs of wind blade manufacturers who need lighter cores for bigger blades,” said Garcia. “The initial prototype work with TYCOR opened the door for use of an alternative material and a new material source for us. TYCOR’s structural performance properties allow us to achieve cost and weight advantages that conventional cores don’t offer.”

Garcia added that TYCOR W contourable core is more durable than other contourable core products on the market and performs effectively in flat or curved shapes and with less resin absorption than foam and balsa cores. “These material features support my ability to be flexible,” he said.