the skyrocketing price of fibre
Globally, the skyrocketing price of fibre, together with a sharp increase in its use in the automotive and aerospace industries, is responsible for the rapid growth in carbon fibre recycling; this growth has led to the involvement of major players in the motor industry (Stoeffler et al., 2018). The current cycled carbon fibres are not largely competitive with the pure fibres whose performances are outstanding. A lot needs to be fixed in terms of recycling processes to ensure that the end recylate is competitive enough in the market. The main objective of this project is to highlight the present state-of-art of fibre reclamation and re-manufacturing process, CFRP recycling processes, the latest technical developments and the forthcoming commercialisation challenges, the existing recycling and re-manufacturing processes to the final recyclates and their respective potential market applications. The project targets the carbon fibre recycling companies; these firms will use the findings to advance their recycling processes and produce better recyclates. Secondary data analysis was the main source of data. The geographical context of the research is the United Kingdom where two companies have been identified for analysis, these are ELG Carbon Fibre and sigmatex. This research poses no risk either environmentally or economically. The research report will be an eight paged detailed compilation of the analysed data. The use of alloys as a state of art has strengthened the end recylate and improved performance.
Technical Content and Discussion
The Latest Technical Developments and the Forthcoming Commercialization Challenges
The recent years have seen manufacturers develop demonstrator applications to be able to test the new reclaimed fibres. Also, according to McConnell (2010), many manufacturers are embracing the grinding process industrial applications in the glass fibre reinforcement, which gives a better quality of the end product. The companies also employ the use of white cells where the carbon fibres can be reclaimed without darting and also viably recycled as reinforced in the new complexes (McConnell, 2010). The present commercialisation challenge for CFRP is that the industrial applications that deal in recycled fibre and resins are few. McConnell (2010), equates this to the uncertainty in the function of CFRP that are generally seen to be of low quality. Also, the industrialists consider the recycled fibre to be uncontrolled with regard to their length, surface quality, and length distribution. Often, there are different fibre grades present in a batch of recycled complexes from varied manufacturers (Stewart, 2009). Thirdly, according to Stewart (2009), the recycling of composites is more or less not closed-looped according to the efficiency of the resources because fibre recyclates cannot be reused in a certain application. The author adds that this is a major challenge to the aerospace industry because the reclaimed fibres from the structural parts of an aircraft cannot be reused. Therefore there is a need for the development of relevant applications and various standards needed to manage the reclaimed fibres. Statistics presented by Sun et al (2015), indicate that unlike recycled carbon fibres, virgin fibres show varied tensile characteristic with nylon pellets