Cytec Industries (Woodland Park, NJ) has acquired an equity position in Penso Holdings, a leading engineering services, vehicle conversion, and composite part manufacturing company headquartered in Coventry, United Kingdom. The terms of the agreements will not be disclosed.

The companies have also signed a joint agreement to develop fast-curing, optimized composite materials product forms and rapid, cost-efficient composites processing technologies such as an innovative variation of hot compression molding, to accelerate the adoption of composite parts in serial automotive applications.  This builds on Cytec's resin formulation and application engineering expertise and on Penso's leadership in composite part engineering and manufacturing.

Penso, a privately held company, is a leading engineering firm and supplier to several European OEMs, with proprietary state-of-the-art engineering, simulation, and manufacturing capabilities suited for the design and serial production of structural composite parts. Penso is currently investing heavily in setting up automated capabilities to produce composite parts in large volumes for transportation applications including serial automotive and rail.

Recent Penso projects include design of a lightweight composite rail car door based on a phenolic matrix that reduced part weight by 11.3 kg, well above the agreed target of 5kg. This is 30% lighter than the existing aluminum version. "This is a major attraction for the train operators and manufacturers and we are currently targeting a number of companies in Europe. If initial interest is anything to go by, we expect this to add up to £2m per year to our sales," says explained Daniel Hurcombe, Managing Director.

"Cytec has been making critical advances on its serial automotive materials and applications technology roadmap, through the development of novel rapid curing materials and product forms designed for automation, enabling high rate production of composite structures. This alliance with Penso strengthens our ability to jointly tailor materials, design and manufacturing technologies to maximize composite parts performance while minimizing finished part cost, and further establishes our companies as key partners to automotive and other industrial sectors OEMs for composites-intensive new programs. We look forward to working closely together and offer comprehensive composite solutions to our customers," says Markus Aschauer, Vice President of Cytec Industrial Materials.

"I am very excited to have signed this agreement given Cytec's strong technology and commitment to the high volume automotive market. We will be able to offer customers our joint engineering, materials and application expertise and work with them to develop integrated solutions to meet their needs. This agreement confirms our capability to support high volume serial automotive composite part production programs," says Hurcombe.