Issue 10, 2020

A structural chemistry look at composites recycling

Abstract

Composite materials, especially carbon fiber-reinforced polymers (CFRPs), are high-performance class of structural materials now commonly used in aircraft, marine, and other applications, with emerging large-scale use in the automotive and civil engineering applications. The difficulty of recycling these materials is a key obstacle preventing their further application in larger markets. For decades, the engineering community has pursued physical methods to recover value from end-of-life composite waste. This work has generated scalable methods to recover modest value from CFRP waste, but because of their low value recovery, these are applied to a small fraction of CFRP waste. By contrast, relatively few methods to recycle CFRPs have been based on strategic approaches systematically to deconstruct the thermoset polymers that hold them together. In this Focus Article, we will show the emergence of these structure-focused approaches to CFRP recycling and illustrate the path of this research toward the ultimate realization of methods to recover both the reinforcing fibers and the thermoset materials that comprise modern CFRPs.

Graphical abstract: A structural chemistry look at composites recycling

Article information

Article type
Focus
Submitted
03 7 2020
Accepted
21 8 2020
First published
21 8 2020

Mater. Horiz., 2020,7, 2479-2486

Author version available

A structural chemistry look at composites recycling

C. A. Navarro, C. R. Giffin, B. Zhang, Z. Yu, S. R. Nutt and T. J. Williams, Mater. Horiz., 2020, 7, 2479 DOI: 10.1039/D0MH01085E

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements