Carbon fibre towers now mass produced and offer many advantages over steel

Geostrut will be unveiling an exciting new innovation in tower manufacturing at the TowerXchange Meetup. It’s been a long time coming, but carbon fibre towers are finally being mass produced - it’s been worth the wait! Carbon fibre towers have some genuine advantages over steel in terms of weight, ease of installation and corrosion resistance. TowerXchange caught up with President and CEO Craig Barker to learn about the potential use cases of carbon fibre towers in emerging markets.

TowerXchange: Please introduce Geostrut to our readers.

Geostrut is an eight year old company - our carbon fibre towers are our third generation technology, launched four and a half years ago. The prototypes we’ve built have been well received, and we’ve refined the product and completed our mass production process just three weeks  ago. We’re ready to introduce a product design that is ready to compete head to head with steel towers on price.

Some people wonder how we compete with steel tower manufacturers, a mature, 75-100 year old industry, when we’re this new innovation that has only just gone into mass production. One of the keys to commercialising carbon fibre towers has been that suppliers of our raw materials have identified that our company has the potential to be the largest consumer of carbon fibre in the world. Thus, we are the recipient of very aggressive raw material pricing. Other applications of carbon fibre, even aviation, use a limited amount of raw material. But because we’re talking about infrastructure, the potential of the market is huge. Add to this a nearly automated manufacturing process and the price of our product has become very competitive.

We’re going to concentrate on the wireless market first, then consider moving into power transmission, automotive, aerospace and construction applications in the future. But we’re not moving on from wireless until we’re immersed in the business and we’ve mastered the mass production for this industry.Geostrut identified wireless as our core target market five years ago. The tensile and compressive strength of carbon fibre is well known, but used alone it would have needed so much raw material as to not be competitively priced against steel. Carbon fibre also didn’t have the bending and impact strength to withstand the wind loading required in telecoms. So we developed a lattice carbon fibre inner structure with a carbon fibre skin, and this combination requires less raw material while giving us independently certified bending strength to meet the wind load capacity requirements of telecoms.

We have secured a couple of patents and have a couple more pending.

We conducted a study with a major US aerospace company who were working with thin walled, pure carbon fibre tubes on a top secret project. They compared the strength of their pure carbon fibre tubes with our lattice Geostrut structures that use directionalised carbon fibre enabling us to use half as much raw material, and found our lattices structures equal to or stronger and approximately half the weight of the pure carbon fibre tubes.

TowerXchange: What are the advantages of carbon fibre over steel towers?

Carbon fibre towers have three main advantages over steel towers: weight, ease of installation and resistance to corrosion.

Carbon fibre towers weigh about one tenth of the weight of an equivalent steel monopole. This is critical for logistics. Geostrut’s tapered monopole sections can be taken apart and nested, so a 26m tapered monopole is nested into the base section and the entire carbon structure weighs just 249kg. We can get eighteen such towers in a 40ft container! We are targeting opening regionalised manufacturing facilties, but for now we can manufacture and ship towers from the US to Africa for just US$250-300 per tower delivery costs.

Of course inland logistics are even more critical given the under-developed state of the road network in many African countries. Moving light-weight Geostrut towers to remote locations is a lot easier than moving the equivalent steel structures. Our towers can be moved on a regular truck trailer, and individual sections of our towers can even be moved around by hand by a couple of guys - on most of our designs, the heaviest section is 100kg. So not only are carbon fibres inexpensive to move, they are also safer to handle because they’re not as heavy.

Let’s talk about ease of installation. Labour requirements are much lower than for steel towers - you can assemble a Geostrut tower and erect it at a new site in half a day. The bottom section is bolted to the base (there may be a need for a small change to the foundation, but it incurs little cost), then the foundation can be hinged, so you can assemble it on the ground and complete erection by hand swinging it up with ropes. This is important because heavy equipment to install structures is often not readily available in emerging markets, and not needing a crane means there is no need to pass heavy transportation and installation vehicles along under-developed road networks.

Another advantage of carbon fibre is that it doesn’t corrode like steel, which means less maintenance visits and opex. We also have an additive to our resin that prevents damage by UV rays.

We quote the same 50 year lifetime as steel but frankly we’re being conservative - industry standards attribute other carbon fibre structures quote significantly longer lifespans. The biggest difference in lifespan occurs in corrosive environments such as marine, coastline and island locations, where a steel tower can rust in less than 20 years. A carbon fibre tower is good for at least 50 years, regardless of the application.

Geostrut towers come out black, but can be painted for high visibility applications such as near airports.

TowerXchange: What are the typical use-cases of Geostrut’s carbon fibre towers?

While we have designs up to 50m, to date we’ve manufactured up to 32m.

We compete primarily with steel monopoles. I remember visiting India two and a half years ago when they had just rolled out hundreds of thousands of three and four legged towers for 3G. At that time nobody wanted to talk about monopoles - now the market is maturing toward 4G, no-one talks about towers over 40m, and monopoles are preferred!

Carbon fibre has a real advantage on rooftops because of its light weight. I remember speaking to a tower executive in India who said he couldn’t put steel structures on rooftops in certain sectors of the country because the buildings weren’t strong enough. Especially in emerging markets where building construction standards aren’t the same, a lot more rooftop sites are going to be viable options using 6-18m carbon fibre rooftop towers than if you use steel.

TowerXchange: What’s the maximum capacity of your carbon fibre towers in terms of tenants?

We’ve built structures with capacity for the antennas with microwave dishes of three tenants, and good for wind speeds up to 55m/s, which is sufficient for the majority of multi-tenant towers.

TowerXchange: Tell us about the capital outlay required on a per tower basis.

It depends where the tower is manufactured and local labour costs, and we’re determined to develop localised manufacturing bases.

Based on manufacture in our current US factory, we can produce a 24m tower for US$8-10,000 and 30m for $11-13,000 depending on loading and wind speed. Which means both manufacturing costs and shipping are very competitive to steel in the US and Europe. We can beat the price of equivalent steel monopoles in some regions, it’s tougher to beat the price of steel structures in other regions that source inexpensive steel locally.

TowerXchange: What is Geostrut’s interest in the African market?

Geostrut are going to be making our African debut at the TowerXchange Meetup next month.

Africa is experiencing very rapid growth in telecoms and the opportunities for us on the continent are very exciting. We have partnered with Connect Africa, a specialist in rural telecoms, to determine the size of the opportunity. They want to reduce overall site infrastructure costs in the rural market and see real benefit in the ability to quickly and cost-effectively deploy light-weight towers in areas that are difficult to access. We are aiming to build a local manufacturing capability in Africa by the middle of 2014, in collaboration with the entrepreneur backing Connect Africa.

TowerXchange: I appreciate Geostrut have only just moved from prototypes to mass production, but do you have any towers already installed that prove their performance in the field?

We currently have two towers standing in Brazil, three in Australia, and one delivered but not yet standing in India. The oldest structure went up two years ago with no reported problems since.

We only finished the mass production process three weeks ago, but we already have orders for our first 36 towers - including nine going to Malaysia to an operator who is excited to be the early adopter in that part of the world! Plus we have two towers leaving our facility by air freight to Africa - including a two section tower to be assembled outside the TowerXchange Meetup!

Visit Geostrut at booth #16 at the TowerXchange Meetup and see their innovative carbon fibre tower installed in the courtyard outside! To register for the Meetup, click here