FP Waterjet: Cold, Clean Cutting for Carbon Fiber and Advanced CompositesCarbon fiber has moved from exotic to essential. It now forms the primary structure of the newest commercial jets, it is spreading through defense platforms and electric vehicles, and demand is climbing fast enough that the material’s biggest bottleneck is no longer whether to use it, but how to work it. Cutting carbon fiber composites cleanly is genuinely difficult — and getting it wrong is expensive. That is where the cold, abrasive precision of waterjet earns its place.

A Market Climbing Toward $100 Billion

The scale of the composites boom is hard to overstate. According to Research Nester, the global aerospace composites market was valued at roughly $35.1 billion in 2025, is estimated at $39.2 billion in 2026, and is projected to reach $95.7 billion by 2035 — an annual growth rate of about 11.8 percent. Carbon fiber is the engine of that growth, projected to make up the largest fiber segment at more than 56 percent of the market by 2035, with North America holding the single largest regional share.

The drivers are structural, not cyclical. Aircraft makers use composites to shed weight and burn less fuel; defense programs want lighter, stronger platforms; and automakers are turning to carbon fiber for lightweighting as they push range and efficiency. Every one of those parts has to be cut to shape somewhere, and the surge in volume is pulling more composite work down into regional shops. The broader demand picture behind this — the record aircraft backlog and reshoring wave — is the subject of Reshoring and the Aerospace Boom Are Fueling Demand for Domestic Waterjet Cutting.

Beyond the Airframe: Where Carbon Fiber Is Spreading

Commercial aircraft are only part of the story. Carbon fiber is pushing into an expanding set of platforms, and each new application widens the pool of parts that need precise cutting. Electric air taxis are a vivid example: Research Nester notes that in late 2025 a major materials supplier entered a long-term partnership to supply composite and adhesive materials for the VX4 electric aircraft, targeting certification in 2028. Urban air mobility, in other words, is being built largely out of composites from the ground up.

Defense is the second front. Military aircraft, and especially unmanned aerial vehicles, lean heavily on carbon fiber for the same strength-to-weight reasons — and federal programs are actively funding domestic thermoplastic composite manufacturing for defense aviation. The third is the automotive world, where carbon fiber lightweighting is being used to extend electric-vehicle range and performance. Taken together, aerospace, air mobility, defense, and EVs form a broad, durable base of demand — and all of it eventually reaches a cutting table.

Composites Are Made Right Here in the Upstate

This is not a distant trend for South Carolina manufacturers. The Upstate is already a composites hub. Solvay operates advanced-materials production in the Greenville area, at the S.C. Technology and Aviation Center in Piedmont — the same site where carbon fiber production began in 2014. As Solvay has documented (Solvay press release), the company built out a 27,000-square-foot thermoplastic composites manufacturing line there, adding more than 30 positions and producing high-performance composite tapes for aerospace, automotive, and energy customers.

What that means on the ground is that carbon fiber and advanced composites are being made, specified, and consumed within a short drive of the shops that serve the region. As those materials move downstream into brackets, panels, prototypes, and structural parts, the demand for precise composite cutting lands squarely on local job shops — and the method used to cut them matters more than most buyers realize.

Why Cutting Carbon Fiber Is So Difficult

Carbon fiber laminates behave nothing like a sheet of metal. They are built from layers of fiber locked in a resin matrix, and that layered structure is exactly what makes them hard to cut cleanly. Mechanical cutting tools tend to pry those layers apart at the edge — a failure called delamination — and can pull individual fibers out of the matrix, leaving a frayed, weakened edge that may not pass inspection. The fibers themselves are brutally abrasive, so conventional tooling dulls quickly, driving up cost and inconsistency across a run.

Thermal methods bring their own problems. Because a composite is part plastic, applying concentrated heat can char or scorch the resin, degrade the matrix, and leave a heat-affected zone that compromises the part — an issue we cover across materials in our guide to waterjet cutting materials. And there is a safety dimension that is easy to overlook: cutting carbon fiber dry throws off fine, electrically conductive dust that is hazardous to breathe and can foul nearby electronics and equipment. Between delamination, tool wear, heat damage, and dust, cutting carbon fiber the wrong way turns an expensive material into an expensive problem.

Waterjet’s Edge on Composites

Abrasive waterjet sidesteps most of those failure modes at once. Because it cuts cold — eroding material with a fine, high-pressure stream of water and garnet rather than melting or tearing it — there is no heat to char the resin and no heat-affected zone to degrade the laminate. The matrix stays intact right up to the edge. And because the cutting force is delivered by a narrow, controlled stream rather than a tool prying through the stack, waterjet dramatically reduces the delamination and fiber pull-out that plague mechanical cutting, leaving a clean edge that holds up to inspection.

The water itself solves the dust problem. Cutting submerged or flooded, waterjet captures the fine carbon particulate that a dry process would send into the air, protecting both people and nearby equipment. There is no tool to wear out against the abrasive fibers, so quality stays consistent from the first part to the last, and a single system cuts thin skins, thick laminates, and sandwich structures alike. That same versatility across difficult materials is what makes waterjet so valuable to the defense supply chain, as we explore in The Defense Manufacturing Surge Runs on Precision Cutting — and Waterjet Delivers. For a material this valuable and this unforgiving, a cold, clean, dust-controlled cut is not a luxury — it is the responsible way to work it.

FP Waterjet: Composite Cutting in Upstate South Carolina

FP Waterjet cuts carbon fiber and advanced composites the way the material demands: cold, clean, and delamination-conscious. From our facility in Landrum, South Carolina, we serve aerospace, automotive, and general manufacturers across the Greenville-Spartanburg-Asheville corridor — the same region where those composites are made. Whether you need a single prototype panel or a production run of composite parts, our team stays directly accessible from quote through delivery, and our nesting keeps expensive material yield high.

Our Services Include:

Aerospace Waterjet Cutting — Cold, clean cutting of carbon fiber composites, aerospace alloys, and titanium, with edge quality that stands up to inspection.
Waterjet Cutting Services — Abrasive waterjet cutting on composites, metal, foam, and plastic, with no heat-affected zone across a wide range of thicknesses.

Ready to Transform Your Operations? Contact FP Waterjet to discuss your composite cutting requirements or send your CAD files for an accurate quote before any material is cut.

Works Cited

“Aerospace Composites Market Size, Forecast Report 2035.” Research Nester, 25 Feb. 2026, www.researchnester.com/reports/aerospace-composites-market/3822. Accessed 13 July 2026.

“Solvay Adds New Thermoplastic Composite Capacity in the United States.” Solvay, 16 Sept. 2021, www.solvay.com/en/press-release/solvay-adds-new-thermoplastic-composite-capacity-united-states. Accessed 13 July 2026.

About the Author

Chris Urban is the Founder of Forged Path Automation. His 26+ year manufacturing career spans from an international manufacturing specialist trained in Zurich, Switzerland, to corporate President and business owner. Before launching Forged Path Automation (FPA), Chris scaled an industrial gas turbine business unit from its infancy to $50M in value, directed the zero-downtime relocation of 100+ industrial machines to a 150,000 sq. ft. Center of Excellence, and led US operations for a $2.3B global firm. Today, Chris leverages his deep technical roots and an MBA to engineer turnkey robotic finishing cells that deliver total production stability and clear ROI for high-mix manufacturers. Chris holds an advanced background in both the technical and financial sides of manufacturing, combining studies in Applied Science with a Master of Business Administration.

Connect with Chris on LinkedIn to talk shop or discuss your floor’s ROI.

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Cutting Carbon Fiber Without Delamination: Waterjet’s Edge as Composites Demand Soars