Application of supercritical water for green recycling of epoxy-based carbon fiber reinforced plastic

By Young Nam Kim, Young-O. Kim, S. Kim, M. Park, Beomjoo Yang, Jaewoo Kim, Y. Jung. Composites Science And Technology, 2019

198 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The objective of this study is to fabricate conductive carbon fiber composites with thermal and electrical properties by degradation carbon-fiber-reinforced plastics (CFRPs) and recycled carbon fibers using only supercritical water without any catalyst or oxidant. We focused on a recycling method that is harmless to the human body and environment-friendly, by using supercritical fluid water rather than recycling CFRP by physical or pyrolysis methods. In particular, we recycled carbon fibers (R-CFs) in which up to 99.5% of epoxy resin was removed, by optimizing the conditions of supercritical fluid water (SCF-W) treatment, and we fabricated conductive R-CFs composites with thermal and electrical properties by combining the R-CFs with cyclic butylene terephthalate (CBT), which is a polymerizable low-viscosity thermoplastic resin. The fabricated composites had a thermal conductivity of 1.35 ± 0.05 (W/mK) and an electrical conductivity of 11.23 × 10−6 (S/cm) when the added amount of recycled carbon fibers was 5 wt%.

Subfields: Materials Chemistry, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c826bb51a6f32be7d8f1e1a1ac5a67c4a901b2f1