Glass fibres account for 95% of fibre reinforcements currently used in the composites industry, principally because of their highly attractive performance to price ratio. Many glass fibre reinforcement products are made at speeds that exceed 1000 m/min. Within milliseconds of forming and cooling, glass fibres are coated with a "sizing" by contacting an applicator roll that carries a layer of an aqueous dispersion of organic materials. The sizing pickup occurs over a contact distance of less than 10mm in about 0.5 ms. All this combines to make sizing development and application a major technological challenge to commercial glass fibre production. It also makes attaining the optimum coating composition and coverage a major challenge to the production of high performance composite materials.
