Biaxial Vectran cloth in laminate

Hello all. This is first post on BD after lurking for a number of years and reading just about every thread extant. Preface this by saying my background is in kayak racing and dinghy sailing so were talkin smaller scale composites work. In 1996 I was on the US National Whitewater team and manged to secure a product sponsorship from Hoechst Celanese (us division in Charlotte NC). I was in the process of scheduling a new race boat and the Celanese rep procured for me something very exotic to incorporate into the laminate. He gave me some overruns of Vectran LCP spun and woven into a 6oz 4 harness biaxial cloth. The resulting boat also incorporated carbon and Airex in the deck and carbon + Spheretex in the hull, although it was predominantly the Vectran cloth. Layup was sort of a vacuum assisted resin transfer with a low viscosity Derakene epoxy, post-cured in ambient heat. Well this was by far the best race boat I had ever owned. 10kg for a 4.5m boat with lots of volume. I have owned many racing kayaks with various schedules of S-glass, aramid, carbon, basalt, prepregs with nomex cores, even spectra cloth from allied signal so I have some basis of comparison here. These boats obviously undergo stresses in whitewater racing both tensile and more importantly shear/ductile stress from inevitable collisions with rocks at high speed, in addition to cyclical loading, etc. The boat in question did not seem to suffer from a stiffness standpoint even though Vectran is not known for being high modulus. Moreover, the boat literally just bounced off of rocks that would have caused damage to more typical layups. When I say bounced I mean if you whacked the hull it sounded like bouncing a basketball on a gym floor. It was as though the layup way high-rebound like a urethane or something with a large coefficient of restitution. Don't know if the Vectran cloth had been sized or treated somehow but it didn't delaminate at all which was pretty typical with aramid or worse yet Spectra cloth (yuck!). I won two nationals with that boat and when I sold it 3 years later after heaps of abuse, It looked practically new. So the question is. I have not heard of Vectran in cloth form being used in laminates before or since. Cordage, sure. Sail welding as scrim, yes. But not in structural applications. Celanese sold the patent to another company if I'm not mistaken and I've never even seen it woven into cloth since. Is this just my ignorance from being out of the exotic composites loop or was this just a dead end? My experience were so positive I'd be curious to learn of other examples of Vectran in epoxy laminate. I don't mean filament wound in tennis rackets, I mean cloth or UD in a boat hull. What were the drawbacks besides low UV resistance and moderate stiffness? Is. It a candidate for infusion with thermoplastic resins? Mostly asking out of curiosity as its been nagging at me for 20 years to learn more.. Thanks in advance for your consideration.

 

Just a quick note, the boat in question was not in fact RTM but double bagged for the Airex deck with a dry bag. Meaning the resin is poured into mold containing cloth, bagged, and then manually squeegeed throughout while under vacuum. With enough inlets on the mold flange pretty good Hg this works as well or better than wet layup bagging and I guess is sort of a poor man's RTM with manual squeegee assist and allows for much finer control of bubbles and voids than all but the most sophisticated RTM setup in my limited experience

 

Here you go, http://www.doylesails.com/design/vectran.html