Carbon fibre reinforced plastic EOL : protecting remanufacturing status and life cycle route analysis

Paterson, David and Ijomah, Winifred and Windmill, James (2015) Carbon fibre reinforced plastic EOL : protecting remanufacturing status and life cycle route analysis. In: International Conference on Remanufacturing (ICoR 2015), 2015-06-14 - 2015-06-16, RAI Amsterdam.

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Abstract

For a remanufacturing industry to take hold within society it is critically important that people understand the term remanufacture. While general public remanufacturing awareness problems of course exist, within academia and industry remanufacturing awareness issues can also exist. It is also true that academia and industry are both directly involved in strategies to reuse carbon fibre reinforced plastic (CFRP) waste obtained from the manufacturing process (cut offs for example), and that obtained from end of life (EOL) CFRP products such as aircraft. Through a lack of awareness, remanufacturing terminology is often used to describe creating a new product from an existing one within these sectors. This of course is a problem for two main reasons. Firstly, remanufacturing is a standalone process, having its own protocols and criteria that must be adhered to and secondly, if the term remanufacture is not used correctly, a lack of awareness of remanufacture will inevitably continue. This paper presents a brief description of the efforts by industry and academia to create new products from waste and EOL CFRP. It goes on to mention why remanufacture terminology although used is not generally applicable to describe these products. Further, to help stop the potential spread of remanufacturing terminology being used wrongly in this growing sector (which only seeks to water down true remanufacturing meaning) and to increase remanufacturing profile in general a product identification flow chart is presented. The flow chart has two main purposes, 1) it informs the user involved in product EOL whether they have remanufactured, recycled, reconditioned, repaired or re-used a product and 2) it allows for a very simple and efficient method to analyse any previously owned (i.e. not brand new) product in terms of the type of EOL treatment performed.

ORCID iDs

Paterson, David ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1517-7952, Ijomah, Winifred and Windmill, James ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4878-349X;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)