IVW is a non-profit research institute located at Kaiserslautern, Germany. The institute’s mission is to research and develop technical applications of composites and their potential, and to communicate currently known facts in this field to companies, research centres and interested individuals. Its main competence lies in the field of polymer based composite materials and IVW covers the whole area from material science, design and calculation aspects to production technology. The equipment available for design, testing, analysis and especially manufacturing science is state-of the- art technology and meets, or exceeds, all industrial requirements and enables IVW to work on projects beginning from the idea and finishing with a full size prototype. IVW has taken part in several projects founded by European Commission within the 5th and 6th Framework Programme, and is involved in already running projects of FP7,e.g. ESPRIT, NATEX, TransIND, and H2SUSBUILD. Some of the main developments worked out over the last years are the development of a ring winding technology to increase the process efficiency (AVK Innovation Award 2006 and JEC Award 2007) and the development of a fully automated tape placement process for thermoplastic tape material enabling to perform an in-situ consolidation on autoclave level (JEC Innovation Award 2009).