Engel: Thermoplastic composite rotor blades for drones

JEC premiere Engel masters fully automated drone rotor blade production

2026-03-04 Source: dpa 2 min Reading Time

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At JEC World 2026, Engel will be demonstrating how drone rotor blades made of thermoplastic composites can be produced in series in reproducible quality and fully automated.

What you can see here are the first fully automatically produced composite rotor blades made of thermoplastic CFRP for drones. The company that has mastered this production process is called Engel. It will be presented at the JEC World 2026 in Paris.(Source: Angels) — What you can see here are the first fully automatically produced composite rotor blades made of thermoplastic CFRP for drones. The company that has mastered this production process is called Engel. It will be presented at the JEC World 2026 in Paris.
(Source: Angels)

Engel knows how rotor blades for drones can be produced economically from thermoplastic composites. This will be one of the main topics at the Austrian company's JEC World presentation from March 10 to 12. The central element of the process is a structural sandwich structure made of carbon fiber-reinforced thermoplastic tapes (CFRP) and an injection-molded short-fiber compound. The tapes form the load-bearing cover layers of the rotor blade. They are precisely positioned in the mold and fixed in place using a vacuum. This allows the reinforcements to be laid out exactly along the load paths. This also means that material is only used where it is required for structural performance. The core component made of a thermoplastic reinforced with short fibers is then injected between the previously positioned tapes and bonded to the cover layers to form a near-net-shape component structure. To further exploit the lightweight construction potential, the core component is physically foamed using Engel's Mucell process. This reduces the component weight while maintaining the same structural performance. The result is a particularly lightweight yet highly resilient composite rotor blade that is ready for immediate use after final trimming.

Recyclable rotor blade innovation with the right partners

One of the aims of the "NeoBlade" project was to interlink aeroacoustic design, material and tool development, process automation and sustainability assessment at an early stage and transform them into an overall solution that can be implemented on an industrial scale, as Engel reports. The project partners are Alpex Technologies, the Energy Institute at the JKU Linz, Facc Operations, Plastic Innovation and the Vienna University of Technology (Aircraft Systems Research Group). Various thermoplastic systems were investigated.

The spectrum ranged from high-temperature resistant materials to cost-efficient alternatives. Compounds with recycled carbon fibers were also used, as emphasized. Life cycle analyses are said to have demonstrated a significant reduction in the CO₂ footprint compared to established thermoset (thermoset) processes or composites. An additional advantage is that thermoplastics are generally easy to recycle because they can be remelted. In addition to the sustainability aspects, the focus was also on cost-effectiveness. The key cost advantage of thermoplastic processes lies primarily in their industrial scalability, which can be achieved through multiple cavities, for example, as well as in very short cycle times and a high degree of automation.

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