Some More Uses for Recycled Carbon Fiber – Flexible Solar Panels?
- Ned Patton
- May 25
- 6 min read
Updated: May 25
I saw a really cool article in one of my news feeds that I thought I would write about this week. There is a company in France that has come up with a very light weight solar panel system that unfolds like origami and is light enough that you can take it along in your camper van or sailboat or even take a single piece of it camping.
As you can see from the picture caption, the structure of the panel is made using recycled carbon fiber in a thermoplastic resin. This small husband and wife startup in Italy they call Levante, worked with another French company, ReCarbon and their polypropylene Replate materials. The carbon fiber reinforcement in this thermoplastic is entirely recycled, hence the name of the company that makes it.
They had to work out the isolation of the electrical parts of the solar panel from the conductive carbon fiber, so that took them a couple of years to figure out, but they did so and these things are now on the market. If you take a look at the video in the Composites World article (https://www.compositesworld.com/articles/recycled-carbon-fiber-panels-power-40-lighter-durable-semi-rigid-solar-panels?utm_source=Omeda&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=CW+Spotlight+5%2F7%2F2025), each panel has a zipper along two or three edges, so you put them together with fabric zippers. And when they are all put together you can fold them up like origami and store them in the back of your car.
Apparently the husband and wife team that started Levante used the same concept that NASA uses to unfold solar panels in space. They tried out their first prototype on a sailboat owned by the “sailing duo and content creators” Sailing Uma, who were using traditional solar panels on their boat. The Levante panels are not only lighter weight and therefore easier to handle, they are also made from carbon fiber composites which are nearly impervious to the corrosive atmosphere that all ocean surface craft are subject.
These were so successful that this husband and wife team decided to make a product out of it. And of course, since they are most interested in generating electricity carbon free, they decided that they needed to use recycled carbon fiber for the structure of their semi-flexible panels. That is when they approached ReCarbon to source the fiber.
The production panels with the zippers are made in standard shapes that can be expanded easily from one to many panels depending on the application and the needs of the application for them. Since they are mostly, at least at the outset, focused on recreational use, they decided that a one size fits all approach was probably impractical. So these folks really did focus on the eventual use case for their product before they even started to make them. This is actually the hallmark of a successful product introduction – the customer base is ready made and there is a real need and demand that nothing else will quite fit.
This is just the newest and at least to this author, the most interesting use of recycled carbon fiber. The VW Eurovan in the pic above doesn’t hurt. Such an iconic vehicle to those of us that remember the days of the hippie vans with flowers painted on the sides of them.
I have written previously about Carbon Conversions in Lake City, South Carolina. They have been recycling carbon fiber scrap and waste since 2019 and have fairly recently developed partnerships with sports car and racing car companies. Of note, they have a fairly new partnership with Vermont Sports Car, a high end rally car prep shop, to use their recycled carbon fiber product re-Evo® recycled carbon fiber non-woven mat into the body panels for their rally cars.
This recycled carbon fiber mat is helping Vermont Sports Car take significant weight out of the body of these cars while also using recycled materials rather than virgin carbon fiber. This is a very good example of how scrap material that would otherwise be sent to a landfill can be used to fill a need that requires the weight savings and strength of carbon fiber but is probably more price sensitive than normal for a carbon fiber application. And since it is randomly oriented fiber in a mat, during production it is quite capable of being draped into the complex curvatures required to make it look like a replacement car body. And when they get into the bumps and scrapes that these cars take out on the rally track, something like this can very easily be repaired with more of the recycled carbon fiber mat and some resin in the hands of professionals that fix these bodies all the time.
In one more example, a fairly large carbon fiber manufacturer, Mitsubishi Chemical Group, has a product that they call CarboNXT™ that is a recycled carbon fiber product that comes in several forms, including carbon fiber non-woven mat. These folks have developed a circular model for their virgin fiber products by collecting the fabrication scrap from composite parts manufacturers that use their virgin fiber and pre-preg products and recycling it into CarboNXT™ and selling it into different markets than their traditional aerospace market.
It appears that recycled carbon fiber is finding a niche in the vast composites market where companies that are providing it can make a profit. We’re getting there.
Now on to another topic. I am writing this post late this week because I have been at the SAMPE conference in Indianapolis this week. I am in fact sitting in the Indianapolis airport waiting for my plane home as I write this.
SAMPE was a great event this year. Attendance was a little lower than previous years, primarily because of Government travel restrictions, so there were fewer US Government employees attending and fewer of the attendees from outside the US as well. But, overall, it was a great conference. There were several really new and interesting technologies in composites that were showcased at the conference and there was an overall focus in sustainability and reduction of the carbon footprint of the industry. There was even a keynote address at the awards breakfast from the Director of R&D at Cummins that gave a talk about how Cummins perceives its mission is getting not only their company but all of their customers to net zero emissions of CO2 by 2050. It makes a difference that Cummins is one of the largest if not the largest diesel engine manufacturer on the planet.
In my next newsletter I will give everyone a data dump on the SAMPE conference and what I got out of it. And I promise I’ll post my newsletter earlier in the week than late on Thursday. And it won’t be from an airport either.
That’s about it for this week. As always, I hope everyone that reads these posts enjoys them as much as I enjoy writing them. I will post this first on my website – www.nedpatton.com – and then 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. And that is especially true of the companies and research institutions that I mention in these posts. The more we communicate the message the better we will be able to effect the changes in the industry that are needed.
My second book, which should be out in the fall, is a roadmap to a circular and sustainable business model for the industry which I hope that at least at some level the industry will follow. Only time will tell. Since my publisher and I have finally come to agreement about the title for my next book, our daughter has been kind enough to put together a draft of the cover of the book for them to use to come up with a final version. So, I’ve included the approved cover at the end of this post as promised. Let me know whether or not you like the cover. Hopefully people will like it enough and will be interested enough in composites sustainability that they will buy it. And of course I hope that they read it and get engaged. We need all the help we can get.
Last but not least, 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 for an unsigned one, except that I have to charge for 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 are pictures of the covers of both books.
