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Toray Aims to be Leading Carbon Fibre Supplier for eVTOLs

Toray Indus­tries, a lead­ing car­bon fibre mate­ri­als’ man­u­fac­turer, aims to “get a jump on its com­peti­tors” by estab­lish­ing a pri­ma­ry coun­try base for its devel­op­ment of car­bon fibre, specif­i­cal­ly focused on sup­ply­ing the nascent eVTOL indus­try, reports akihabaranews.com.

That coun­try base is Japan. For accord­ing to a report in the Nihon Keizai Shin­bun (yet to be offi­cial­ly con­firmed), the plan calls for the cre­ation of a facil­i­ty in the city of Nagoya to include an open lab for joint research with client com­pa­nies and uni­ver­si­ties and to host around 140 researchers. This facil­i­ty is to employ arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) with the objec­tive of devel­op­ing car­bon fibre mate­ri­als for lighter air­frames, thus improv­ing the per­for­mance of an eVTOL air­craft.

Nagoya is the cap­i­tal of Japan’s Aichi Pre­fec­ture, a man­u­fac­tur­ing and ship­ping hub in cen­tral Hon­shu. It has a pop­u­la­tion of over 3 mil­lion peo­ple with­in an area of around 326 kms.

Toray’s invest­ment for this research base is expect­ed to be close to USD45 mil­lion. The facil­i­ty should be open by 2026. Toray already sup­plies its car­bon fibre mate­ri­als to Lil­i­um and Joby Avi­a­tion and is seen as a lead­ing glob­al play­er in this mar­ket with a man­u­fac­tur­ing share of around 30 per­cent.

Joby Founder and CEO JoeBen Bevirt has said that Toray’s mate­ri­als “pro­vide unpar­al­leled spe­cif­ic strength and tough­ness, that have enabled Joby to devel­op air­craft with unprece­dent­ed capa­bil­i­ties.”

The part­ner­ships with Lil­i­um and Joby were both announced in 2020.

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.toray.com/global/

(News Source: https://akihabaranews.com/)

(Top image: Lil­i­um)

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