#composites, #sustainability, #naturalfiber, #fibers, #resins, #biobased, #boeing, #airbus, #plantbased
I saw an article this month in Composites World where the editorial staff visited the Airbus plant in Illesecas, Spain. This is the plant where a lot of the composite parts for the A350 are made. In fact, the composite fuselage section for that aircraft is made at this 1.8 million square foot facility.
Section 19 fuselage barrel of Airbus A 350 with Stringers – Composites World Sept 2024
This is a pic of the Section 19 fuselage for the A350 showing its 42 co-cured stringers. You can see off to the left that there is another one just like it sitting next to it. They are obviously making these aircraft as fast as they can, since the A350 is one of the hottest selling aircraft in the world. There are 1330 firm orders to date, and Airbus has delivered 618 of them to customers worldwide.
This aircraft and the 787 are the two wide body, long range commercial aircraft being made by the two remaining commercial aircraft manufacturers. And both of them are largely made using composite materials. This is a testament to the wonderful nature, and the power and utility of composite materials. This also means that composites are no longer niche materials, but are completely mainstream. And, this will only get to be more prevalent until nearly all commercial transport aircraft will become mostly composite.
What struck me about this article in Composites World, however, is that they mention fairly prominently that Airbus is starting to apply some bio-based materials to their composites production. In their article from August 28 of this year, “Airbus works to improve the life cycle of composites in future aircraft”, they specifically mention what Airbus is doing to make their composites manufacturing more sustainable. Airbus has signed on to the European Green New Deal and is actually doing the hard work to implement sustainability measures into the composite components in their large commercial aircraft. This includes means of recycling end of life composites, more sustainable manufacturing methods, recycling uncured scrap composites, and even work on bio-composites.
Airbus Plant in Illescas, Spain – Composites World August 28, 2024
It is this last effort on the part of Airbus that caught my attention. It appears that Airbus is seeing the same thing that I am seeing with regard to especially carbon fiber composites. That is that these materials, even though they are light weight which saves on fuel costs and reduces CO2 emissions, still have an enormous carbon footprint.
To that end, Airbus was the topic manager of the HELACS project (Holistic processes for the cost-effective management of End of Life of Aircraft Composites) which ran from January 2021 to December 2023. The goal of that project was to demonstrate industrially and environmentally safe methods for recycling carbon fiber composites. While they focused on reclaiming the carbon fiber by pyrolysis, which I have written about many times, at least they paid attention to trying to recycle the fiber rather than chopping up their end of life aircraft and land filling.
Airbus has even started the process of trying to qualify biocomposites for their aircraft, which of course require both European and FAA certification. They understand that in the past biocomposites have not had the mechanical properties, nor the quality consistency required for major transport aircraft. Airbus is actually actively working to change that because they understand that biocomposites are the future of the composites business.
So, what is Boeing doing in this regard. That’s a good question. To this author, from what I have been able to gather, Boeing is still a bit in the back seat when it comes to composites sustainability. Partly this is because Boeing is traditionally a very conservative company and partly this is because there is less impetus in the US to move to a more plant-based set of raw materials for use in composites.
Boeing is, however, focused on recycling of their aged out commercial aircraft and has signed on to several initiatives in sustainability, albeit not in plant-based composites. They have signed agreements with several composites recycling organizations, and have also worked diligently to reduce the weight of their transport aircraft so that they burn less aviation fuel.
The sustainability initiatives at Boeing largely reflect what would be expected from a very tightly regulated industry and a very conservative company. Mostly this has to do with sustainable aviation fuel, reduction in fuel consumption by making their planes lighter weight, responsible disassembly of aircraft at end of life including the reuse of a majority of the parts of these aircraft for use by existing operators of those aircraft, and recycling of uncured and cured scrap from their factory floors.
To their credit, they have, for as conservative a company as they traditionally are, really done as much as they can within the boundaries that exist here in the US and within their organization. And, I for one do not count them out entirely on eventual adoption of plant-based composites since the biocomposites industry is just now starting to come of age.
That means that we will, in a fairly short span of years to maybe a decade, have available to us plant based carbon fiber and epoxy resins that are not only lower cost, but they will be drop in equivalents to the current petroleum based raw materials.
I am after all, quite optimistic about this because I have been involved in this for a while and can see the trends happening. We are going to get there because we must. And there are extremely smart people working on this problem right now that are very close to cracking the code to make carbon fiber composites truly sustainable.
That’s about it for this week. I hope everyone that reads these posts enjoys them as much as I enjoy writing them. As usual I will post this first on my website – www.nedpatton.com – as well as on LinkedIn. And if anyone wants to provide comments to this, I welcome them with open arms. Comments, criticisms, etc. are all quite welcome. I really do want to engage in a conversation with all of you about composites because we can learn so much from each other as long as we share our own perspectives.
I also wanted to let everyone know that I have finished the first draft of my second book. This one is about what I have been writing in these newsletters for the last 6 months or so – sustainability of composites and a path to the future that does not include using fossil fuels for either the raw materials or the process energy to make composites. Stay tuned to this space and I will let everyone know about my progress as I try to find a publisher. Hopefully that will not take too long, and there is the possibility that McFarland will pick this one up as well. I sent them a message about two weeks ago, so fingers crossed.
Finally, I still need to plug my first book, so here’s the plug. The book pretty much covers the watershed in composites, starting with a brief history of composites, then introducing the Periodic Table and why Carbon is such an important and interesting element. The book was published and made available last August, and is available both on Amazon and from McFarland Books – my publisher. However, the best place to get one is to go to my website and buy one. I will send you a signed copy for the same price you would get charged on Amazon, except that I charge $8 shipping. Anyway, here’s the link to get your signed copy: https://www.nedpatton.com/product-page/the-string-and-glue-of-our-world-signed-copy. And as usual, here’s a picture of the book.
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