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Our Story
Under the supervision of Professor Steven Nutt, Director of the M.C. Gill Composites Center at the University of Southern California, an extensive team of undergraduate students, doctoral students, and post-doctoral researchers spent nearly a decade developing and demonstrating the effectiveness of through-thickness permeable prepreg formats for robust, VBO composites processing. Such prepregs and the processes by which they can be fabricated were the subjects of several peer-reviewed journal publications and many more technical conference proceedings, all of which demonstrated that the approach adopted by Apogee offers clear benefits over traditional prepreg formats.
Successes in the lab demanded efforts begin to commercialize Apogee's approach to prepreg, and Apogee Composites was founded in 2019, shortly after doctoral students Bill Edwards, Mark Anders, and David Bender won First Prize at the USC Maseeh Entrepreneurship Prize Competition.
In 2021, Apogee received a strategic equity investment that will support opening a pilot manufacturing facility and subsequent expansion.
Apogee is on schedule to open our first manufacturing site in Los Angeles, CA in the Spring of 2023 where we will produce woven and unidirectional prepregs and adhesive films.
What Makes Us Different
Apogee prepregs are engineered to have through-thickness gas permeability orders of magnitude higher than competing out-of-autoclave prepregs. This through-thickness permeability facilitates and expedites removal of entrapped gasses during de-bulking and processing, resulting in composite structures that reliably pass quality inspection even when processed in the absence of the compaction pressure provided by an autoclave.
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Our innovation does not rely on unique resin chemistry or selection of a fiber system or sizing. Instead, it can be applied to any material system that is found in conventional prepregs. Customers who adopt Apogee prepregs will immediately see improved part cycle times due to reduced debulking periods enabled by more efficient gas evacuation.
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The Benefits
Our unique product will make it easier, faster, and less expensive to produce high-quality composite structures. Using our VBO prepreg, composite structure manufacturers can expand production capacity by purchasing ovens at 10-15% the cost of comparable autoclaves, unlocking significant savings in capital equipment investment.
Further, the patented format of Apogee prepregs uniquely enables a variety of applications of prepreg for which conventional formats are fundamentally unsuitable such as in-field repair of composite aircraft.
By combining Apogee’s prepreg format with Apogee’s patent-pending cure process, Apogee’s technology also enables use of a wider variety of resin formulations that cannot traditionally be used in out-of-autoclave manufacturing scenarios.
Work With Us
We would love to work directly you to develop unique prepreg materials and formats tailored to fit your individual needs.
Apogee is continuously developing new technologies related to prepreg format, prepreg processing, and composites manufacturing to staying on the leading edge of innovations in the composites industry.