Surfing On Advanced Composites

Surfboard manufacturing may conjure up images of a guy in board shorts and a respirator hand crafting boards in a California garage. In reality, though, surfboards have gone high-tech. Consider, for example, a radical new board design from Hydro Epic Inc.

The company creates its patented surfboard from advanced composites — laminates of aluminum honeycomb, epoxy and various combinations of Kevlar, carbon fibers and glass. It's a surfboard that would appeal as much to aerospace engineers as to surfers.

Boat designers would find its design familiar too. Hydro Epic's founders, Peter Mehiel and Mark Itnyre, both sailors, took some cues from sailboat design and made their surfboard hollow like the hull of a ship. "The composites are just a shell," says Mehiel. "There's about two to three inches of air space inside the board."

The hollow Hydro Epic board couldn't be more different than most modern surfboards. For the past few decades, just about all surfboards have been constructed from a solid polyurethane foam core stiffened by a wood stringer and encapsulated by fiberglass. And while there have been plenty of innovations related to board design, they have been incremental ones. "Board shapers reached a plateau in terms of what they could do with foam," explains Mehiel. "The foams used in surfboards just won't allow drastic reductions in weight or improvements in strength or stiffness."

The same can't be said for composites. Mehiel says the hollow Hydro Epic boards weigh 15 to 50 percent less than a foam core board.

More important than the weight, however, was creating a board that "surfs better." Mehiel acknowledges that this can be a slippery concept since it relies on the subjective feedback from surfers riding under constantly-changing conditions. "Every wave is different, so it's impossible to duplicate conditions the way you would in a lab," Mehiel says.

	Unlike the solid foam-and-fiberglass construction of most modern surfboards, Hydro Epic’s board consists of composite shell that resembles a boat hull.

Still, he makes a strong technical case for why composite boards can offer a performance edge. It all comes down to controlling stiffness. Hydro Epic uses composites engineering methods — including materials selection, fiber orientation and rib placement — to make the boards more flexible in their long axis. According to Mehiel, the boards offer about 15 to 30 percent more flexibility than a comparable foam-and-fiberglass board. In Mehiel's view, the extra flexibility, without breaking, helps keep more of the board in contact with the wave at any given time, "which results in more efficient energy transfer between board and wave."

At the same time, Hydro Epic engineers its boards to have about 10 percent more torsional stiffness than a foam board. Mehiel believes the extra torsional stiffness helps keep the board's rails in better contact with water when the surfer carves turns in the face of the wave.

Composites have other advantages too. Mehiel notes that epoxy composites have good tensile and fatigue strength. So the boards hold up to lots of abuse. What's more, he says, the two-step molding and bonding process inherently offers more manufacturing efficiency than the multi-step, multi-supplier process used for foam-and-fiberglass boards.

The downside to the use of composites has been price. Hydro Epic sells boards for $800 to $1,250, while conventional boards usually cost between $500 and $900. But a couple of factors weigh in Hydro Epic's favor. Strength is one. "Aggressive surfers might break two or three boards a year," Mehiel says.

And then there's a foam supply disruption that has put the surfboard industry in a panic. Clark Foam, which by most accounts supplied upwards of 90 percent of foam blanks used by North American surfboard makers, unexpectedly threatened to close its doors late last year. Prices for finished surfboards shot up almost overnight. Mehiel says he's seen prices rise by as much as $150 on $500 boards. "I think the time is right for composites," he says.