The general public , and those that should knowbetter such as engineers and designers, tend to have twoperceptions of composites: either as fibre-glass - a rather second-rate material used to make kit cars; or as an esoteric carbon fibrebased material used only in fighters and stealth bombers. Bothperceptions are wrong. The reality is that nearly 5 million tonnesof thermoset composites were used world-wide in 1997 inapplications as diverse as bridges, boats, cars and windmillsrepresenting a global business worth some
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