The vision of the EU HORIZON 2020 program is to bring breakthroughs, promising discoveries and great ideas from the lab to market. This will create and guarantee jobs. The aeronautical sector through the Clean Sky 2 Work Program aims to contribute to one of the main social challenges of ‘intelligent, ecological and integrated transport’ defined in Horizon 2020, allowing cutting-edge solutions to reduce the environmental impact of the sector and achieve the ACARE 2020 targets, facilitating the first steps towards the Flightpath 2050 targets that include 75% CO2 reduction and 90% NOx consumption, as well as 65% noise reduction.
The Clean Sky 2 program pursues the delivery of large-scale in-flight demonstrations of novel architectures and configurations, including advanced technologies demonstrated at the complete systems level, that would not otherwise be affordable to the private sector with manageable risk. In this sense, the competitiveness of European industry is promoted from an environmental and economic point of view.
New machine to recover and recycle uncured scrap
About a third of the world’s carbon fibre ends up in landfills. With the demand for the material expected to exceed annual production capacity within the next few years, the industry is looking to recycling of carbon fibre composites as a solution. The EU-funded RECYCOMP project is developing a machine for the recovery and recycling of carbon fibre-reinforced polymer uncured scraps, taking the surplus material coming from lamination and generating new useful pre-impregnated material in a roll. This new machine will be able to identify the scraps’ area and fibre orientation. Then it will cut the scrap into rectangular chips that will be placed in a new backing material for subsequent use.
