| Aeropreg İleri Kompozit Malzemeler · AS9100 Certified |
Issue 06 · October 2026 |
The Prepreg Brief
Aerospace · Defense · Marine — a monthly note from the Aeropreg team
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In this issue
| 01 Editor’s note |
04 Raw materials & markets |
| 02 Sector radar |
05 Technical corner |
| 03 From Aeropreg |
06 Outlook & compliance |
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01 · Editor’s note
Electric mobility runs on prepreg — and Aeropreg is building the next layer
The pattern this month is hard to miss. The shift to electric, low-carbon transport is, underneath the batteries, a composites story. An all-electric seaplane, a sustainable concept car, an eVTOL air taxi, an electric yacht tender: four very different machines, all built on prepreg. The reason is simple — nothing delivers more structural performance per kilogram. When range is set by weight, the airframe, the hull and the body-in-white become the most important battery decision on the vehicle.
Aeropreg is moving with that shift, not watching it. This month we are opening a development collaboration with First Graphene (ASX: FGR), the Australian advanced-materials company, to produce graphene-enhanced prepreg — First Graphene’s resin, on Aeropreg’s reinforcement fabric, tested and taken to market together. The full story is in From Aeropreg below.
Raw materials are steady. ACN and PAN precursor are holding off their mid-year lows, demand is soft, and freight has settled. And this week Aeropreg is exhibiting at TURKCOMPOSITE 2026 in Istanbul, 21–23 October. If a qualification timeline or a second-source decision is on your desk, talk to us early rather than scramble late. Our details are at the end of this note.
— Ahmet Uslu, Chairman of the Board
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02 · Sector radar
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AUTOMOTIVE
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Shell’s “Triple 10” EV rides on seven sustainable prepregs
SHD Composites built seven custom sustainable prepreg formats into Shell’s Triple 10 Challenge concept car — bulkhead, seat rows, loading deck, A-pillars, roof. The targets: a sub-ten-minute charge, around 10 km/kWh, and roughly 50% lower life-cycle CO₂e. It is a clear signal that mass-market EV structure is now a prepreg conversation, not an aerospace-only one — the same lightweight structural discipline Aeropreg builds for, aimed at automotive weight-down.
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AEROSPACE
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Sarla’s Shunya eVTOL chooses aerospace-grade prepreg
India’s Sarla Aviation partnered with Hexcel for aerospace-grade prepreg, carbon and glass reinforcement, honeycomb core and surfacing films for its Shunya eVTOL air taxi — six passengers, one pilot, commercial service targeted for 2028–2029, already flying as the half-scale Sylla SYL-X1. eVTOL is a demanding new home for qualified prepreg: airframe-light and certification-heavy, with no tolerance for inconsistency — exactly the class of AS9100 carbon, glass, quartz/cyanate-ester and hybrid material Aeropreg produces in Türkiye.
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MARINE
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A 290 kg prepreg carbon hull for an electric tender
Italy’s Amare Group built the AMY 330e electric tender on a 290 kg pre-preg carbon hull, paired with a 15 kWh LiFePO₄ pack. Larger AMY 395e and 420e models are coming, along with more in-house carbon-fiber manufacturing. In an electric boat, every kilogram the structure saves is range, payload or battery cost handed back to the owner — the same marine structural case Aeropreg’s prepregs are built for, light hulls that still take the sea.
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DEFENSE
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Thermoplastic forming scales up for aerospace and defense
Cato Composites added a 500-ton stamp-forming press and a semi-finished line for higher-rate thermoplastic parts in aerospace and defense. Thermoplastics chase cycle time and reprocessability; thermoset prepreg holds the qualified structural property base. Rate-capable capacity coming online is a useful signal of where serial defense part counts are heading.
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03 · From Aeropreg
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FEATURED
Aeropreg × First Graphene: graphene built into the prepreg
Aeropreg has entered a development collaboration with First Graphene Ltd (ASX: FGR), an Australian advanced-materials company and a leading producer of bulk graphene. The model is simple: First Graphene supplies a graphene-enhanced resin; Aeropreg, as manufacturing partner, impregnates it onto our own carbon and glass fabric to make a graphene-enhanced prepreg; the material returns to First Graphene, and the two of us test it and bring it to market together.
Why it matters. Graphene is a rare additive that improves a composite on several axes at once — interlaminar toughness and fatigue, electrical and thermal conductivity, and moisture barrier. That opens prepreg that carries load and performs a function in the same ply. The collaboration pairs First Graphene’s materials science with the fabric-to-prepreg manufacturing Aeropreg has built in Denizli since 2024.
To be transparent, this is development and qualification work—not an off-the-shelf product today. We will share results once they have been rigorously validated, not before. If graphene-enhanced reinforcement is part of your design roadmap, we would be glad to start the conversation now.
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This week · Istanbul
Aeropreg is at TURKCOMPOSITE 2026 (formerly Meet4Composite), Istanbul Fair Center, 21–23 October — Türkiye’s composites technology platform, with the Composite Manufacturers Association. Find our stand, or write ahead and we’ll tell you where to find us and set a time.
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Who you’ll meet
AS9100-certified prepreg from a vertically integrated group — carbon fabric since 2011, prepreg since 2024. Carbon, glass, quartz/cyanate-ester and hybrid systems for aerospace, defense, marine and automotive, with graphene-enhanced development now in the pipeline.
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04 · Raw materials & markets
ACN & PAN precursor — off the lows, demand still soft
The year’s arc is clear: spring tightness, a propylene and ACN sell-off through June–July, a recovery off the mid-year lows in August, and into October a firmer-but-unexcited hold. Cost has steadied; demand has not yet followed. We are not printing a fresh index this month rather than repeat last month’s as if it were new — our September read put Northeast Asia ACN near US$1.64/kg, with Europe and North America on either side, and nothing says that has moved materially. Treat it as directional; verify against your own contracts. The energy and feedstock risk tied to a tense Strait of Hormuz stays a background watch on the propylene-to-ACN chain.
Aerospace-grade fiber — demand intact, supply unchanged
The multi-year demand story holds: independent work still frames global carbon fiber at roughly US$6.4 billion in 2026, growing toward US$9 billion by 2031 (about 7% a year). No major new aerospace-grade capacity was announced this month, so near-term supply is steady, not looser. The structural shift is regional — and it is the one that matters to buyers here: home-grown fiber, local converters and AS9100 prepreg from Aeropreg are what turn “single-source risk” into a qualified second-source option in Türkiye.
Freight & landed cost
Ocean freight has settled after the late-summer climb, but the lanes are diverging: transpacific firmer through peak season, Asia–Europe easier as Suez routing normalizes. Landed cost this month is less about one headline index and more about which corridor your material travels. We would rather compare real quotes with you than lean on a snapshot.
Industry conversation
With upstream costs steadied but not settled, contract-based price revision and pass-through mechanisms stay a live topic. The direction still favors measured, predictable frameworks over ad-hoc surcharges — predictability is worth more to most programs than the last percent of price.
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05 · Technical corner
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What graphene does inside a prepreg — and why dispersion decides it
The structural half. A laminate is strong along the fibers but relies on the matrix between and across plies — which is where delamination starts and plain epoxy is weakest. Well-dispersed graphene platelets sit in that resin-rich region, bridge and deflect microcracks, and can lift interlaminar toughness and fatigue life with no meaningful weight gain.
The functional half. Carbon fiber conducts along its length, but a laminate is a poor conductor through its thickness. A connected graphene network in the matrix raises electrical and thermal conductivity — the basis for electrostatic dissipation, EMI shielding, lightning-strike management and heat spreading, functions usually bought with add-on foils or meshes. Graphene can also tighten the resin’s moisture barrier.
The catch: dispersion. Graphene wants to re-stack into graphite; agglomerates become defects, and loading the resin raises viscosity in ways that fight tack, drape and wet-out. A graphene-enhanced prepreg is only as good as the uniformity of that platelet distribution and the process window around it. That is precisely what the Aeropreg–First Graphene collaboration is built to solve — a well-characterized graphene source paired with disciplined, repeatable impregnation. If this is a lever you are weighing, talk to us about what is realistic on your fabric and your cure.
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06 · Outlook & compliance
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Outlook — next 30 days
Event-led: TURKCOMPOSITE 2026 in Istanbul (21–23 October) for Aeropreg this week, Carbon Fiber 2026 in Huntsville (10–12 November) on the global calendar — notes from the floor in the next issue. Expect the talk to stay on qualified capacity and second sources, while the electrification examples here keep widening where prepreg appears. With ACN steadied and freight calmer, programs have room to lock qualification and lead time before the next tightening.
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Regulatory watch
EU Regulation 2021/821 (dual-use) export licensing remains the friction point for European-origin feedstock and finished material crossing borders. Carbon fiber’s status as a strategic material under the EU Critical Raw Materials Act stays worth tracking for medium-term sourcing — part of why regional, qualified second sources keep rising on buyers’ agendas.
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Aeropreg İleri Kompozit Malzemeler
AS9100 carbon fiber, glass, quartz/cyanate-ester, hybrid & graphene-enhanced prepreg for aerospace, defense, marine & automotive
Denizli OSB · Türkiye | AS9100
info@aeropreg.com · www.aeropreg.com
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© 2026 Aeropreg İleri Kompozit Malzemeler · All rights reserved |
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