It all started with a question that Dr. Travis Williams asked himself. “I wasn’t sure if it was possible to fully recycle composite materials,” said Dr. Williams, professor of chemistry at the University of Southern California (USC) Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “As wonderful as these materials are for making energy-efficient vehicles, the problem with composites is we don’t have a practical route to recycle them, so the materials end up in landfills.”
Dr. Williams and his research team at USC partnered with the M.C. Gill Composites Center at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, the USC Alfred E. Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, and the University of Kansas to develop a process to recover and recycle composite materials and polymers while maintaining their integrity. The team states in the abstract of the paper on the project that the resulting technology is the first system to reclaim a high value from both the fiber fabric and polymer matrix of a CFRP.
The new upcycling method rescues the carbon fibers from the composite materials in good condition, maintaining more than 97% of original strength. The USC team used a fungus developed at the University of Kansas called Aspergillus nidulans to recover and rebuild the polymer matrix from the composite materials by chopping the polymer into benzoic acid and using it as a food source for the fungus to produce OTA.
“OTA can be used to make products with potential medical applications, like antibiotics or anti-inflammatory drugs,” explained Dr. Clay C.C. Wang, professor at USC Mann and chair of the Department of Pharmacology and Pharmaceutical Sciences. “This discovery is important because it shows a new, more efficient way to turn what was previously considered waste material into something valuable that could be used in medicine.”
Dr. Williams added, “This breakthrough comes at a crucial time, as the demand for CFRPs continues to grow. With projections indicating significant increases in CFRP waste in the coming decades, this concept offers a promising solution for sustainable materials management.”
