According to research conducted on behalf of the trade media and event organiser JEC, the Asian composite market will be expected to double between now and 2015, moving from 32% to 50% of the total world market volume. With such a rate of growth, the popularity of a major supporting trade exhibition has been a certainty, and the France-based JEC brand is now firmly established as a key event on the Asian industry calendar. Last year's event saw exhibitor numbers swell by 15% to over 345. Even more promisingly however, over 40% of its exhibitors had already rebooked for 2010 by the end of the event.
Similar in format to its larger Parisian sibling, the annual JEC Asia event will return to the industry hub of Singapore where for the first time, its traditional conference and end user forum programme will be expanded and rebranded as the Innovation International Composites Summit (IICS), running across all three days of the show.
The IICS programme will explore the latest breakthrough innovations across the whole industry through eight individual conferences. The theme on this occasion – ‘sustainable growth for composites in Asia' - is naturally geared towards companies looking to diversify and take advantage of new technologies while ensuring they are on the right path. The content itself is largely based on application case studies and expert presentations by internationally renowned industry specialists and will bring together about 100 papers delivered by speakers from major companies, universities and research centres, and leading trade associations.
“One of JEC's missions is to inform, educate and promote composites solutions worldwide with a full range of seminars, conferences, forums, technical sales presentation and workshops,” stated JEC president and CEO, Frederique Mutel. “This process of information sharing will be especially beneficial for the composites market in Asia, where there is a strong and rapidly growing demand for leading edge applications across a broad spectrum of industries.”
Four specific industry segments will be represented, which JEC describes as showing the most promising growth prospects for composites, as well as separate economic, technical, cross-industry and legal conferences. The ‘aeronautics' forum in particular, which is supported by SAMPE and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), is running under the theme of ‘killing costs with composites'. This will be an increasingly important aspect of manufacture over the coming years not only because of the imminent productionisation of the first indigenous Chinese commercial aircraft, but also because of the expected worldwide growth of the aerospace industry, with JEC predicting that up to 31,000 new planes will be required by 2029.
Altogether there will be six specific aerospace presentations:
• ‘Lightweight structures with material integrated textile sensors' - Michael Heinrich, Chemnitz University of Technology
• ‘Impact damage resistance and damage tolerance performance of composite sandwich aircraft structures' – Dr Gang Zhou, Loughborough University
• ‘Non-destructive testing of composite materials: shearography' – Rafael Schoen, Steinbichler Optotechnik
• ‘Development and manufacturing of a complex contour wing demonstrator for supersonic flight with VaRTM process' - Yasunari Kuaratani, KADO Corporation
• ‘Development and manufacturing challenges of multi-scale, morphing and heat-barrier composites' – Sunil C Joshi, Nanyang Technological University
• ‘Establishing a leading composite aerostructures industry in the UAE' – Eric Sparrow, Strata
The familiar technical sales presentations and business meetings will also return, as well as the popular JEC Innovation Awards ceremony, which recognises those international partnerships that come up with innovative solutions for processes, products and applications across 12 categories.
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