Recycling polyamide for automotive industry
Polyamides are the most important group of engineering plastics. They exhibit outstanding features, such as toughness, elasticity, excellent resistance to chemical agents, good flame resistance, and increased tolerance at high temperatures. All these make polyamide materials suitable for many applications in the aerospace, automotive and heavy equipment industries. An important aspect of these materials is that they can be easily and rapidly processed. Due to this and the advantages they offer, this project focused on developing compounding technologies for recycling these materials for further use. The recycled polyamides may come from various industries, but their use is so far restricted to the manufacture of components, like fan blades and shrouds for the automotive industry. The project resulted in some important findings for the cost-effective production of parts. These findings included the optimum composition of the material (waste and raw) used for enhancing the quality properties of the produced components, the specification of the process characteristics of compounding and the cost estimation for the quality compounds. This technology offers many benefits. These include the conservation of resources, the reduction of landfill requirements and associated costs and energy savings. Furthermore, it provides new opportunities for new products and consequently increases employment opportunities. Such innovative techniques in the energy and materials recovery are expected to increase the competitiveness of the European automotive industry in the years to come.
