Abstract
The aim of this article is to apply the concept of Circular Economy, where end-of-life products and production wastes are recycled into reusable materials, to carbon fibre reinforced plastics. This not only reduces the amount of material disposed into landfills, but also enables manufacturers to achieve significant savings. While current research focuses on the performance of recycled carbon fibre reinforced composites after one recycling process, this paper aims to investigate the performance of composites remanufactured from short carbon fibres that have undergone multiple recycling loops with the High Performance Discontinuous Fibre (HiPerDiF) method. The HiPerDiF method enables the production of aligned short fibre composites with exceptional mechanical properties. In addition, using short fibres makes the composite material intrinsically easy to recycle. Short virgin carbon fibres underwent two loops of fibre reclamation and remanufacturing. A correlation between the composites’ mechanical properties and the nature of the fibres, i.e. reduction in fibre lengths, as well as the residual matrix accumulation from the reclaiming process over a number of recycling loops, was established.
Highlights
Circular Economy is defined as an economy that is restorative and regenerative by design, and which aims to keep products, components and materials at their highest utility and value at all times [1]
The specimens are subjected to pyrolysis and new specimens are remanufactured with the reclaimed carbon fibres and tested
In order to compare the results, the elastic modulus and failure strength results for the rCF1 and rCF2 specimens were normalised against the fibre volume fraction of the Virgin carbon fibre (vCF) specimen
Summary
Circular Economy is defined as an economy that is restorative and regenerative by design, and which aims to keep products, components and materials at their highest utility and value at all times [1]. Its application to the recycling of carbon fibre reinforced plastics (CFRPs) has been a subject undergoing intense study both in the academic and industrial fields. Aircraft manufacturers, in partnership with external organisations, have planned various projects to recycle CFRPs. At Airbus Composite Technology Centre, the development of a recycled carbon fibre veil prepreg to replace current glass fibre products used in aircraft interior applications is being explored [3]. Boeing has manufactured small access doors on the underside of the airplane’s wings using carbon fibre wastes from the production of 787 Dreamliner trailing edges [4]. In United States, a bill was passed in the Senate to study ‘the technology of recycled carbon fibre and production waste carbon fibre’ as well
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