LYON—Aerostructures manufacturer Daher, aircraft recycling specialist Tarmac Aerosave and material supplier Toray Advanced Composites have launched a joint program to recycle end-of-life parts made from thermoplastic composites.
While the initiative marks progress toward aviation’s objective to cut its environmental footprint, thermoplastics only account for a small (albeit likely to grow) portion of an aircraft’s weight. On some in-production commercial aircraft, such as the Airbus A350 and the Boeing 787, composites represent half of the weight. Those materials, however, are thermoset composites, the recycling of which have remained a tantalizing goal for the industry.
Melting the resin of a thermoplastic part enables recovery of the valuable carbon fiber reinforcement. On the contrary, engineers have yet to find a process to recover the carbon fibers inside a thermoset and keep their physical properties.
In Daher’s, Tarmac’s and Toray’s joint project, thermoplastic parts will be repurposed for other structural aeronautical applications. The effort centers on the A380 pylon cover, specifically the Toray Cetex TC1100 (relying on polyphenylene sulfide resin and carbon fiber) thermoplastic composite structure. The three companies aim to create methodologies in recycling, repurposing and reprocessing. The A380 contains over 10,000 flying parts made from continuous fiber-reinforced thermoplastic composites, making it an ideal platform for testing and validating recycled material recovery practices, they say.
Airbus provides a framework to reuse the material, while Tarmac ensures components are dismantled without damage, preserving material integrity. Daher is leading the reshaping and the quality validation, performed as serial production conditions, of repurposed parts. Toray, as a materials supplier, is monitoring the material quality for the second-life application.
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