From fibre to foil: automated and integrated manufacturing for marine composites

With its production facility in Poland and R&D and headquarters in Switzerland, the company’s approach merges inhouse material development, advanced automation and rigorous traceability into a streamlined process where repetition does not mean compromise – and precision is embedded in every step, from fibre to final structure. While NTPT built its early reputation on ultra-thin prepregs, below Fibre Areal Weight (FAW) of 100 g/m², itnow develops and processes thicker, more industrial prepregs (typically 100- 300 g/m²) as well, specifically suited to marine applications. These plies provide faster layup, excellent drapability for complex geometries, and are optimised for both manual and automated handling particularly in the hydrofoils manufacturing applications.

Manufacturing automation

Automation is not used to replace human expertise in the composite manufacturing process, but rather to stabilise the most sensitive and errorprone steps in the process, particularly fibre placement and tape layers consolidation within the preforms. A central element of this approach is NTPT’s proprietary Automated Tape Laying (ATL) technology. Developed in-house, this system places unidirectional prepreg tapes along precisely defined fibre paths with high accuracy. The ATL creates multilayer preforms, where each layer’s orientation, fibre type and location are programmed and executed automatically. This enables the construction of tailored laminate architectures, including asymmetrical or non-standard stacking sequences.

ATL is tightly integrated with automated cutting, ensuring that each ply is shaped accurately before lamination. This precision results in uniform, high-quality prepreg stacks, which are then ready to manufacture hydrofoils.

For marine structures, where misalignments or variations in fibre orientation can lead to stiffness inconsistencies or delamination risks, this level of automated process control is a great advantage. Compared to manual stacking, ATL signifi cantly improves repeatability, material utilisation and structural predictability, even for small batch sizes or custom geometries.