The latest Global Market Forecast of Airbus predicted a replacement of more than 15000 aircraft until 2040, with OEMs aiming to recycle at least 90% of the constituent materials, e.g. for carbon fibre composites. Similarly, the automotive industry has to fulfill requirements to recycle at least 85% of weight per vehicle. This goal has been reached and the target now is to make the re-use/recycling/recovery more efficient. To achieve this goal, different strategies are needed than those that are applied today: In the aerospace industry, only components with a remaining lifetime or a written recertification process by the OEM are adequately re-used as spare parts. The vast majority of the structural material (aluminium alloys) is shredded without separation and lose 90% of its value due to incompatible compositions when recycled. In the future the situation will be aggravated as more planes and cars made out of carbon and glass fibre composite materials will reach their end of life. Currently, 98% of these materials end up in landfills or are incinerated. Recycling at the end of life is made more difficult by 20 to 30 years of maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) operations, where new (possibly polluting) materials may have been added. While the documentation of repair work may exist, the e.g. digitized 3D information about repairs is not always readily available. This leads to the following problems: Scrapping of structural aircraft aluminium leads to a random mixture of several different, chemically incompatible alloys which have to be downgraded to lower quality cast alloys. For carbon fibre composites the separation of fibre and matrix (resin) is a chemically difficult process. If the type of resin is not known or if there is a mixture of different types of resin, recycling processes need to apply much harsher treatments and the fibres retain only 85% of their original tensile strength.
Thus, the technical objectives of COMPASS are:
• To develop reforming processes to remanufacture structural alloy parts and thermoplastic composite components without converting them to raw material and by considering the history of these components.
• To establish a digital component passport that manages the storage, updating and access to component data over a period of 20 to 30 years involving all actors along the entire, circular life cycle of the component.
• To develop a set of digital tools, sensors and data acquisition methods that enable data collection during the whole circular process and that allow an efficient re-manufacturing process.
The impact will be achieved through enabling a “shortcut” in the circular process that does not take the energy-intensive route over recycling at the level of raw materials. A key success factor will be to link up the digital passport with standard CAD design tools, so that the information becomes readily available and is updated along the whole process. More than 1.4M€ are planned by 2030 to cover implementation of prototypes in the production lines of tier-1 suppliers and OEMs.
