McLaren Adapts Space Age Carbon Fiber Tape Process To Car Production

McLaren has been on the bleeding edge of carbon fiber technology for more than 40 years now. It all started way back in the ’80s when it started using carbon fiber in the construction of its Formula 1 cars. Throughout the decades, McLaren engineers have led the industry in carbon fiber innovations, and have constantly pushed the limits of what you can do with the tough, lightweight, eye-wateringly expensive material. The company even makes the bodies of its achingly beautiful street cars, rolling works of art like the bonkers W1 hypercar, out of carbon fiber.

Never one to rest on its laurels, McLaren recently announced a new frontier in carbon fiber production—carbon fiber tape. This isn’t “tape” like hundred-mile-an-hour tape or Honda’s spicy, anti-rodent electrical tape. It’s no like duct tape or any other kind of sticky tape. No, it’s a construction method called Automated Rapid Tape (ART) production, and it was perfected in the aerospace industry.

“The aerospace industry uses ultra-precise manufacturing methods to build highly tailored carbon fiber structures for the latest generation of air jetliners and fighter aircraft, particularly for large, crucial parts such as aircraft fuselage and wings,” said McLaren in a recent announcement. “This is achieved via the robotic depositing of composite tapes to layer structures, over traditional hand layup using pre-impregnated materials.”

Here’s how it works: Traditionally, carbon fiber constructs are made by laying down numerous layers of thin carbon fiber sheets mixed with powerful adhesives and forming them into the shape you want. Kinda like a very expensive papier-mâché. ART, however, combines a huge, fixed robot arm that lays down a continuous stream of thin, flexible carbon fiber ribbon impregnated with adhesive with a jig that moves around the arm. It’s essentially a combination of the traditional hand-laid process and 3D printing. This allows the engineers to build lighter, stronger components with less waste. It’s also going to allow for more diverse carbon fiber usage in future projects.

“The Automated Rapid Tape production method and ART carbon structures also unlock immense possibilities for the next generation of carbon fiber architectures,” McLaren said. “Integrating this technology into the structure of an ultra-lightweight, ultra-strong carbon fiber tub – manufactured with minimal waste material generation – that can underpin the next-generation of McLaren supercars is already under consideration.”

The video embedded above does a pretty good job explaining the ART process and how the machine uses the sticky, carbon fiber ribbon (so, I guess it is a sticky tape after all) to make something solid. It’s well worth your time, you should check it out.