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The subject matter discussed in chapter seventeen focuses mainly on understanding various types of composites, however to fully understand the properties and characteristics of composites, we need to know about the different types of fabrication techniques. The fabrication techniques that will be discussed herein are: pultrusion, prepreg, filament winding, and resin transfer molding. But first, the rule of mixtures will be discussed. A composite material is made of two or more materials, for example fiber and matrix. Fiber and matrix each have different properties. When combined, the properties of the composite material is some combination of the properties of the two constituent materials. For certain properties (including density, modulus, coefficient of thermal expansion, dielectric constant and cost), the resulting composite property can be predicted by the "Rule-of-Mixtures". The composite property depends on how much of each of the original materials was mixed together -- hence rule-of-mixtures. The composite property equals: the amoun