I'm a 4th year engineering student studying Composite Materials Engineering at Winona State University. We're working on our senior design project, and the product we're proposing to design and manufacture is an external frame for a backpack. Since almost all production frames for these backpacks are made out of aluminum, we thought it would be beneficial and interesting to fabricate one out of a carbon fiber reinforced composite material.

With that said, my question is if anyone would be able to provide input from a customer based standpoint on our product versus standard aluminum external frames? Another detail about our idea is that we would like the frame and pack to act as a dual purpose item, with the frame and pack folding out into a cot. Therefore one wouldn't have to sleep on the ground.

For our project we do actually need 5 "potential customers" with actual name and contact information (email really), so if anyone here would feel so compelled to share some customer input on a product such as this, please email me your ideas --> comtecintern@yahoo.com


Thank you so much in advance!