JEC Composites Magazine editorial team produces three times a year special issues on top of the regular issues of the magazine.
- Every first quarter: the JEC Composites Observer
Written in collaboration with Estin & Co, it is the annual barometer of the composites industry, which provides a forecast growth up to the five coming years. This publication seeks to give an ample perspective and outlook of the industry for the next five years using graphs, key figures, market dynamics, and insights to illustrate the state of composites globally.
- Every spring: the JEC Composites Innovation Report
From raw materials to disruptive manufacturing processes, the Innovation Report showcases the most striking advances of the year unveiled at JEC World, offering a comprehensive panorama of a fast-evolving global industry.
- Every autumn: the JEC Composites Sustainability Report
Compiling highlights about the part composite materials are playing in creating the sustainable European economy of the future. The purpose of this annual work, rather than results, which quickly become obsolete, is to give examples of approaches contributing to and moving towards sustainability.
In the past, JEC published special issues about end users industries such as smarter cities, mobility, sports, health, and leisure, all these issues being available to all JEC Composites Magazine subscribers.
N°17 - february 2026
N°18 - february 2026
N°16 - november 2025
N°10 - march 2025
N°11 - march 2025
N°9 - october 2024
N°15 - march 2024
N°14 - march 2024
N°8 - february 2024
N°7 - december 2023
N°13 - april 2023
N°6 - march 2023
N°23 - november 2022
N°5 - february 2022
N°22 - september 2021
N°21 - april 2021
N°20 - april 2021
N°4 - november 2020
N°3 - may 2020
N°2 - november 2019
N°1 - march 2019
N°19 - september 2017
10 MILESTONES IN THE HISTORY OF COMPOSITES
PRE- AND EARLY HISTORY, DISTINGUISHING MYTHS AND FACTS
Prehistory Almost every review that seeks to put composites in a historical perspective starts with references to Egyptians, Mongolians or Mesopotamians. Several sources refer to Egyptian and...
THE FOUNDING FATHERS (1900-1930)
During the first decades of the 20th century the scientific and technical base for composites was laid. Leo Baekeland, born in Belgium but working mainly in the USA, invented the process to make...
THE ERA OF ENABLING INVENTIONS: MAKING MATERIAL REVOLUTIONS INDUSTRIAL (1930-1940) AND CREATING PROCESSES “OUT OF THE BLUE” (1930-1950)
Materials The 1930s were a revolutionising era in many respects. They saw the invention of most of the plastics we still use today, as well as the most popular composite reinforcement – glass fibre....
THE FIRST TWO DECADES (1940-1960) OF HESITATING ENTHUSIASM (ENGINEERS) AND (UN)LIMITED IMAGINATION (DESIGNERS)
The aforementioned “enabling inventions” came about as a result of both a “technology push” as well as a “market pull.” The technology push came from chemists looking for exciting new chemistry which...
THE SECOND MATERIALS BREAKTHROUGH: CARBON FIBRES (1959-1969)
The invention of carbon fibres is considered the turning point in the history of composite materials. Suddenly a material became available with a unique combination of stiffness, strength and...
THE ENABLING THEORETICIANS AND THE EVOLVEMENT OF “ORGANISED COMMUNICATION” ABOUT COMPOSITES (1960-1980)
Scientists around the world did not wait until the advent of carbon fibres to try to understand the behaviour of heterogeneous materials. Herakovich’s review76 describes the main steps in the...
SPORTS AND AEROSPACE: COMPETING TO BE THE FASTEST (1970-1990)
Note: The content of the following three chapters is based mainly on four books: Fibre-Fixed. Composites in Design (Pil and Verpoest, 2018), The Challenging World of Composites (JEC Group, 2013),...
THE SECOND PROCESSING BREAKTHROUGH (2000 ONWARDS)
After the initial development of composites-specific manufacturing processes in the decades after World War II, the second wave of processing innovations (filament winding, pultrusion, autoclaving,...
THE SPLASH-OUT TO THE CONSUMERS (1995 ONWARDS)
The past one and a half decades have seen a stronger increase in the application of composite materials than ever before, both in the number and diversity of application areas as well as in the total...
INSPIRED BY A LINGERING MATERIAL DISSATISFACTION: CAN WE IMPROVE…?
The opening up of new and more demanding application areas has confronted composite materials manufacturers with a number of challenges. Properties Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) (Iijima, 1991) and graphene...
YEARS FROM NOW: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES
What does the future hold for composites? Opportunities for the composites industry to continue to develop and expand are immense, but many challenges remain. Here we consider (in no particular order)...
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
To prepare the History of Composites JEC commissioned Ignaas Verpoest, Emeritus Professor of the Composite Materials Group at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, to document the history of the...
A GLOBAL OVERVIEW OF THE COMPOSITES INDUSTRY
A GLOBAL OVERVIEW OF THE COMPOSITES INDUSTRY
Every year JEC publishes the JEC Observer, the annual barometer of the global composites market. The most recent version is called ”Overview of the global composites market in 2021-2026. This...
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