The demand for products made of fiber‐reinforced polymer composites (FRPC) is constantly growing. These lightweight products are characterized by high stiffness, high tensile strength, and high service life. FRPC processes that employ thermoset‐impregnated continuous rovings are easily automated and provide the products with the highest unidirectional tensile strength. A critical disadvantage of continuous fiber‐reinforced polymers is caused by relatively high production costs. Among others, three main factors contribute to these production costs: (1) material costs, especially when carbon fibers are used, (2) costs for manufacturing semi‐finished products, such as textiles or preimpregnated fabrics, and (3) costs for waste occurring along the entire chain of process steps. In this context, one group of processes shows outstanding characteristics: processes in which rovings are in situ impregnated with a thermoset resin and then directly processed. Wet filament winding and pultrusion are the most popular but not the only representatives of this group. For all these processes, in situ impregnation is the key element, and various technologies have been developed for this purpose, each with its own unique fluid‐mechanical effects on rovings. A fundamental understanding of these effects is crucial to achieve products of the utmost quality. The paper at hand provides an overview of manufacturing processes that employ in situ impregnation of continuous rovings, specifically focusing on impregnation technologies. On this basis, phenomenological models describing the effects on the rovings during processing (impregnation, tension, and spreading) are reviewed.

The current growth in use of fiber reinforced polymer composites causes a strongly increasing amount of waste. Current approaches for fiber reinforced polymer composites recycling usually not exploit the potential of endless fibers as they are shortened during recycling and will not be properly aligned in the final product. Considering this, the present work aimed at the development of a recycling process for long recycled carbon fibers, where fiber length is preserved and load-related fiber orientation is possible. The starting point for the presented work was so-called slivers, which are long bundles of fibers resulting from a carding process that has been applied to fiber scrap. The main focus of this work was on the development of a binder mesh application rig that processes the sliver to a binder tape, processable in an automated tape laying process, which in turn required modifications to adapt to the novel tape. The functionality of the binder tape manufacturing process was validated with long recycled carbon fibers slivers with linear density of 4 g/m and fiber lengths between 70 and 120 mm. With the binder tape preform manufactured this way, two alternative routes for composite manufacturing were tested. First, the amount of binder was set so high that direct thermoplastic pressing of the preforms was possible. Second, the amount of binder was minimized, and the preforms were infiltrated with a thermoset resin system via resin transfer molding. While the thermoplastic route showed very deficient fiber–matrix adhesion, with the thermoset route, ≈68% of stiffness and ≈31% of strength of virgin fiber-based composites could be achieved in fiber direction in a unidirectional lay-up.