ABSTRACT

CFOAM® based carbon foam composite tooling offers an alternative to conventional Invar®, steel, and aluminum tools, simplifying tool design and reducing the time to build a tool. Tooling must be low cost, rigid, durable, thermally stable, offer a low CTE (coefficient of thermal expansion), and in many cases be lightweight. For dimensional stability of the tool, the CTE must closely match the part being produced. CFOAM carbon foam has a very uniform thermal expansion when compared with Invar® 36 and 42 which enables post curing of the composite parts on the tool with high temperature BMI resins. Touchstone has developed unique process methods critical for manufacturing carbon foam composite tooling. Both rapid and durable tooling methods have been developed.

BIO

Bob Vale joined the Touchstone Advanced Composites team in January this year. Prior to his current role at Touchstone Advanced Composites, Bob worked at Coast Composites supporting their tooling development team for 1 ½ years. Bob was involved with fabrication, design and development of composite tooling at Northrop Grumman Corporation for 30 years. Bob has lead many development tooling projects while being a Composite Manufacturing Engineer and Manufacturing Technology Engineer on such programs as the YF-23, FA-18 C/D, Super Hornet E/F, Advanced Projects, and the F-35 program.

Bob received his Bachelor of Science Degree from California State University Dominguez Hills.

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