A novel composite material from recycled constituents

Sammanfattning: The increasing industrial use of carbon fibre in e.g. aircraft and wind turbines calls for strategies for their recovery and possible reuse. In additional, tremendous amount of energy is needed to be able to manufacture pristine carbon fibres. The work that has been done was to manufacture engineering composite material made from recyclates. Processing scrap from PURE® was extensively studied in terms of its stability and process ability as a thermoplastic matrix material. In a second study polypropylene scrap material was reprocessed into a film by press forming and introduced into a stack of carbon fibre preforms made from recycled carbon fibres recovered via a pyrolysis process from aircraft structures. The preform stack was heated and the composite material was manufactured by press forming.A challenging issue in this work was to achieve the desired distribution of the recovered carbon fibres in the fibre preforms. It is well known that dispersion of reinforcement is of immense importance for quality and performance of the composite materials. Here, a paper making method is employed to distribute the recovered carbon fibres randomly in the plane. The quality of the manufactured novel, fully recycled, composite material regarding void content and consolidation was controlled by extensive microscopy. The resulting composite material was analysed in terms of its mechanical performance including elastic modulus, Poisson's ratio, strength and strain to failure as well as its creep resistance.