CAMX 2026 | Atlanta, Georgia
The composites industry has never lacked ambitious ideas. Advanced materials are enabling lighter aircraft, new space platforms, more efficient transportation, larger energy infrastructure, and products that would be difficult or impossible to achieve using conventional materials.
The challenge increasingly lies in turning that potential into a repeatable manufacturing process.
That will be an important theme at CAMX 2026, where Vericut will join the North American composites and advanced materials community at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta.
The CAMX conference runs from September 21–24, with the exhibition open from September 22–24. Organized jointly by the American Composites Manufacturers Association (ACMA) and the Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering (SAMPE), CAMX is the largest composites and advanced materials event in North America.
For Vericut, the event provides an opportunity to focus on a part of composite manufacturing that sometimes receives less attention than the material itself: the digital processes required to manufacture complex laminates accurately, consistently, and at production scale.
At Booth BB54, the Vericut team will demonstrate Vericut Composite Programming (VCP) and Vericut Composite Simulation (VCS) - its specialist applications for programming and validating automated composite manufacturing processes.
What to expect at CMAX 2026?
CAMX 2026 will bring together hundreds of manufacturers, distributors, suppliers, researchers, engineers, and OEMs working across composites and advanced materials.
The event serves markets including aerospace, space, automotive, marine, wind and energy, transportation, construction, medical applications, defense, and industrial manufacturing.
Alongside the exhibition, visitors will have access to more than 100 education sessions, technical paper presentations, panel discussions, tutorials, live process demonstrations, and the CAMX and ACE Awards programs.
A new CAMX Innovation Stage on the show floor will host featured sessions covering some of the industry’s most immediate commercial and manufacturing questions, from composite automation and the industrialization of new materials to advanced air mobility, geothermal and oil and gas, bio-based materials.
From material capability to manufacturing repeatability.
Composite manufacturing presents a different programming problem from conventional material removal.
The final component is influenced not simply by its external geometry, but by how individual plies and fibers are placed across that geometry. Fiber direction, course location, ply boundaries, layering sequence, compaction, and the movement of the automated equipment all form part of the manufacturing definition.
As components become larger and more geometrically complex, those relationships become increasingly difficult to manage manually.
CAMX’s own 2026 conference program reflects the growing emphasis on this transition from material development to practical production.
Featured sessions will address subjects including how to quickly industrialize new composite raw materials, automation in composite manufacturing, advanced air mobility ramp-to-rate challenges, and the manufacturing and deployment requirements associated with composites in geothermal and oil and gas applications.
These are ultimately manufacturing questions as much as material-science questions. Developing a higher-performing composite is only one part of the equation.
Manufacturers must also establish how the material will be applied, how the automated equipment will move, whether the programmed process meets manufacturing requirements, and whether the same result can be reliably repeated from one component to the next.
Vericut Composite Programming and Composite Simulation are designed around that problem.
Reliable CNC programming for hundreds of individual layers.
Vericut Composite Programming converts composite design information into practical manufacturing instructions for automated layup equipment.
VCP can read ply information, surface models, and geometry from established CAD environments including CATIA, Siemens NX, Creo, SolidWorks, STEP, SAT, and ACIS. It analyzes CAD surfaces and ply boundaries, allowing programmers to define the direction and orientation of individual plies before generating the courses required to fill them.
Different components require different approaches to path generation. VCP can create layup paths using methods such as specified rosette angles, guide curves, and paths that follow the form's natural geometry. Those courses can then be linked into layup sequences and output as NC programs for automated composite manufacturing equipment.
For manufacturers working with hundreds of individual layers, the value is not simply programming speed. It maintains control over the relationship between the design definition and the manufacturing process as complexity increases.
The same principle applies when requirements change. New geometry, altered ply definitions, different process standards, or changes to the component can be evaluated digitally before they affect physical production.
Layups that instil confidence.
Generating the NC program is only the first part of an automated composite process.
The next question is whether the machine will execute that program as intended.
Vericut Composite Simulation reads and simulates the NC programs that will run on automated layup equipment, recreating the manufacturing environment before production begins. The software can simulate more than 500 individual composite fiber layers and evaluate the sequence of machine operations involved in building the component.
That includes considerably more than displaying where a tape or fiber course has been programmed.
VCS can analyze compaction-roller behavior, form conformance, course orientation, path correctness, layering sequence, and compaction-axis travel. The virtual process can also include machine activities such as head changes, probing, and knife cutting.
Once the material has been applied virtually, engineers can inspect the simulated laminate for properties such as stack thickness, ply offset, ply angle, overlaps, and gaps.
This allows the manufacturing team to identify problems in the digital process rather than discovering them after material has been placed on the physical form.
That distinction is particularly important with composite materials, where a manufacturing problem may not present itself as an obvious machine crash. A program can complete its movement and still produce a laminate that does not reflect manufacturing intent.
Therefore, simulation becomes part of process assurance rather than simply machine protection.
See Vericut in action at CAMX 2026.
At CAMX 2026, Vericut will demonstrate how digital programming and simulation can provide greater visibility across automated composite production before valuable material reaches the machine.
Visitors will be able to explore Vericut Composite Programming and Vericut Composite Simulation, discuss AFP and ATL manufacturing requirements with the Vericut team, and see how programming and virtual process validation can help address increasingly complex composite structures.
About Vericut.
Vericut® sets the global standard for CNC simulation, verification, and optimization software.
Since 1988, Vericut has helped thousands of manufacturers eliminate machining errors, reduce scrap, improve efficiency, and increase confidence in production.
Today, it supports leading aerospace, defense, automotive, and motorsport organizations across the globe.
