Additive manufacturing-inspired approach to re-manufacture fiber reinforced plastic with programmable orientation of recycled carbon fiber

作者：Huang, Haihong^*; Liu, Weihao; Liu, Zhifeng

来源：COMPOSITES COMMUNICATIONS, 2023, 38: 101521.

DOI：10.1016/j.coco.2023.101521

• CFRP
• Additive manufacturing
• Laminates
• Re-manufacture

The carbon fiber recycled from end-of-life Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastic (CFRP) offers a low-cost and environmentally friendly option to produce CFRP parts. However, the reclaimed carbon fibers (rCFs) are usually in a discontinuous and disordered form, which limits the performance of fiber-filled composite. An additive manufacturing-inspired approach is proposed to re-manufacture CFRP, in which the rCFs were dispersed and orderly deposited to form a slice of pre-defined rCF sheet with programmable fiber orientation, then the rCF sheets were stuck layer by layer to fabricate aligned rCF reinforced plastic (rCFRP). Experiments show that preferential alignment degree, flexible strength and electric conductivity of designedly aligned rCFRP were 0.96, 393.53 MPa and 7.23 x 10-1 S/cm, respectively, which are significantly higher than the unoriented rCFRP (0.28, 217.59 MPa and 1.07 x 10-2 S/cm). This approach paves the way for additively fabricating rCFRP parts with customized performance by arranging rCFs orientation.