Recycling Waste Carbon Fibre

Bringing New Products to Market, Creating Jobs in the Local Economy and Meeting Environmental Standards.

Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymer composites (CFRP) are highly valuable engineering materials that offers greater strength, stiffness and energy absorption at one-quarter of the density of steel equivalents.

The challenge

The use of CFRP provides more sustainable transportation solutions and reduced carbon emissions through vehicle and aircraft light-weighting (light-weighting involves the use of advanced materials and engineering methods to enable structural elements to deliver enhanced technical performance with less material). However, Carbon Fibre (CF) production and end-of-life disposal can have a far greater environmental impact than any metal; with up to 40% of CFRP going to landfill.

Professor Kirwan and his team worked with industrial collaborators to create recycled CF composites with the same valuable properties of virgin CF composites but with much-reduced negative environmental impact.

Our approach

To create a recycled CF system for use in high-performance manufacturing industries, including automotive and aerospace, the team undertook extensive fabrication and analysis of materials and production methods. Testing included fibre material, length and arrangement; timing and temperature of the matrix agent; optimising moulding processes and assessing the associated environmental footprints. This produced a comparison of properties for different types of carbon fibre, which allowed for a full assessment of cost against quality.

The team worked closely with engineering designers in industry to ensure the materials were sufficiently robust and could be successfully utilised within the product development process.

Our impact

There have been three key impacts from Professor Kirwan’s research:

• Impact on production – significantly lower costs to use recycled carbon, alleviating shortages of supply and improved environmental sustainability.

• Impact on commerce and the economy - because of improved production, industrial partners’ annual sales have grown rapidly from £300,000 in 2016 to £2,000,000 in 2020 – representing an increase of more than 560%. Additionally, the research has supported the local economy by protecting and creating jobs in the Midlands region.

• Impact on the environment – the recycling of waste carbon fibre vs. virgin carbon fibre production has led to a decrease of 52,700t in carbon dioxide equivalents and is the equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions from 11,385 passenger vehicles driven for a year, the CO2 emissions from 58,000,000lbs of coal burnt, or the carbon sequestered from 68,824 acres of forest.

Discover more of Professor Kirwan’s research