Review of the SAMPE ISSE

Dateline: 05/30/00

SAMPE held its 45th Exhibition and Symposium last week at the Long Beach Convention Center. I attended this year as an exhibitor, my first year in that capacity. Running a booth by myself was tiring, but I've had the long weekend to recover.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by my booth to say hello. There were many people who hadn't heard of this site, but even more who already knew of it. It was great getting to meet many of you in person.

I received many requests for links to sites. All of those URLs are now on my priority list, and I will add them as soon as I can. If you don't see your link soon, don't worry: we are continuing to reformat our sites, and that work takes time away from adding to the site.

Jacket Winner

As part of my exhibit, I held a random drawing for an About.com fleece jacket. To enter, all you had to do was stop by my booth and sign up or leave a business card.

Since many of you may be checking in this week just to find out if you won, I won't keep you in suspense any longer: the winner is Linda Clements of C&C Technologies. I actually knew Linda before the show, and she said she'd feel guilty if she won. The drawing was completely random, though, so enjoy the jacket.

Promoting Your Company

I received many inquiries about promoting products or services on this site. There are several options, listed below. If you have any questions about these services, please feel free to contact me at composite.guide@about.com.

• Banner and newsletter ads, beanadvertiser.about.com
• Sponsored links, sprinks.about.com
• Guest articles and press releases

The latter option drew a lot of interest. Many people didn't know that I accept feature articles from other writers. Publication is free; instructions can be found at the link above. If you are a freelance writer, and the article is not written for a company, I can pay a small amount. Press releases should be sent to me in plain text format.

New Products

Because I was working my booth alone, I didn't have much time to visit other booths. However, a few people did come by to tell me of new products they had on display.

If you stopped by my booth, you probably saw the Grid-Stiffened Fairing demo piece I had on display. This is a project I'm working on with the Air Force Research Lab and Boeing.

Foster-Miller is working on a similar technology with Alliant Techsystems. One of the problems we have had is compacting tows at the grid nodes, where the buildup is double that on the ribs. Foster-Miller has developed an ultrasonic compaction head for filament winders and fiber placement machines. The head provides on-the-fly compaction and partial curing.

The National Composite Center (NCC) has developed an attachment technology they call "Litecast." In this process, a metal end fitting is die cast directly to a composite. The outer resin layer vaporizes and is infiltrated with metal, forming a metal matrix composite. The resulting mechanical bond is superior to an adhesive bond.

Tool Chemical Company, a manufacturer of tooling boards and similar materials, has a new high temperature epoxy board which overcomes the brittleness of some of their earlier products.

Finally, Wilson Composites has just published the World Composites Directory. This publication, listing companies, individuals, products, services, and laboratories, is available in hard copy or CD-ROM formats.

A Sampling of Visitors

I don't have room here to list all of the visitors to my booth, but there are a few I'd like to mention.

Although not a visitor to my booth, National Aerospace Supply Company sponsored a harbor cruise on Tuesday night. This even was one of the highlights of my trip, and I wanted to extend a special thanks to National Aerospace for holding the cruise.

Technomic Publishing was my neighbor to the right. I've reviewed a lot of their books in the past, and I had a chance to see many of their new offerings during the show. Look for some additional reviews over the next several months.

When Allan Goldberg, SAMPE President, stopped by to compliment me on my site, I had to admit I had let my membership lapse. I've now renewed it. If you need to renew or initiate your own membership, SAMPE makes it easy with an online form.

I spoke to several representatives from both High-Performance Composites and the Composites Fabricators Association (CFA). Although our Web sites compete in some areas, I think we agreed that finding ways to cooperate would benefit the entire community.

Matthew Fox, a long-time reader and faculty research assistant at the University of Maryland Composite Research Lab stopped by to say hello. He was with lab directory Anthony Vizzini, who was a resident assistant in my dorm when I was an undergrad at MIT. Previous Features