Unconventional method for recycling CFRPs by using a milling process

Composite materials are increasingly employed in many industrial sectors (transportation, infrastructure, electronics). Among the others, carbon fibers are used primarily as reinforcing agents in high-performance composites with synthetic resin matrices such as epoxies, polyimides, vinyl esters, phenolics, and certain thermoplastics. However, when carbon fibers were coupled with a thermosetting matrix, the resulting composites are not easily recyclable. When these products reaching their end-of-life (EoL) there are several difficulties in their recycling and in the reuse of the carbon fiber reinforce. There are several recycling process methods, but one of the most promising and investigated in the last years is the mechanical one that differently from other approaches do not require the use of high temperature or chemical substances to decompose the polymeric matrix. Respect to known mechanical recycling methods like shredding, crushing and hammer milling process, in this work is presented a mechanical recycling that mainly consists in the use of an un-conventional milling process in order to obtain carbon/epoxy chips. Different chips in terms of geometry and size were obtained by fixing the milling process parameters, so the results in terms of chip morphological characteristic were presented. CFRPs chips, after sieving, were then used to manufacture new CFRPs laminates produced starting from recycled materials.