ELG Carbon Fibre opens its doors to Composites in Manufacturing to give Dr Neil Calder the chance to talk to the company’s managing director, Frazer Barnes.
What is now ELG Carbon Fibre started life in 2003 as R&D company Recycled Carbon Fibre, with an entrepreneur who was sold on the idea of recovering carbon fibre waste. The business model they had then was that if you recover carbon fibre, customers would just buy the carbon fibre from you.
“In reality, even though they have good mechanical properties, recovered carbon fibres are a very difficult material to use,” states ELG Carbon Fibre’s managing director, Frazer Barnes. “Composite manufacturers or engineers want to buy a woven fabric or a non-crimp-fabric (NCF). If I’ve just got a mass of black fluffy fibre, I can’t do anything with it and that’s the problem. You have to have a supply chain process that can do something with that material before you have a viable business.”
The parent company, ELG Haniel Group, has more than 50-year’s history in recycling high-value materials and is now the largest stainless steel recycler in the world. In the 1990s it moved into superalloys and titanium, and again the company is a leader in this area. The ELG method is to understand the importance of quality control to the whole process and having in place quality control procedures to return the material to its highest possible value through production hygiene and traceability, testing and understanding the variabilities.
The result is knowing the material properties going in, and consequently coming out through testing every batch of material on receipt and after processing. The importance of data throughout this process flow is absolutely critical, capturing this at the earliest stage in the conversion cycle. On the supply side as recently as 2014, it had 154 waste feedstock suppliers. Today, in terms of regular supply of material the company has three long-term supply contracts, which run out to 2022 with material converters.
Radiate to innovate
The new addition to ELG’s production line is an NDT function using beta radiation sensing to determine the areal weight of the nonwoven carbon veil. This measures the amount of carbon fibre material between the emitter and detector heads on a continuous scanning basis. ELG says it could have gone into production with the nonwovens two years ago using a very standard line, but it took the time to understand carbon fibre processes and developed a piece of equipment which produces a very consistent product which is exactly what the customers need.
The performance parameters from the recovered nonwoven actually stack up pretty well. There are very clear strength and modulus targets from the six automotive OEMs that ELG is working with currently. Then it comes down to the cost target. And cost of course is bound up with the consistency and quality variability. So, the material has to meet the mechanical property targets, with the right level of consistency, so the process can hit the cost targets which opens the way for the use of these materials.
Gordon Murray Design has integrated the ELG recycled nonwoven material into its iStream composite structural concept, just launched by TVR in its re-born Griffith sports car. The other key market within the transportation sector is rail, and ELG is grant-funded by the Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB) to develop composite structures with Alstom. This project is developing a lighter weight carbon fibre bogie frame, which incorporates secondary functionality, such as suspension and steering within the structure, providing a novel approach to the issue of weight reduction and track wear reduction on the UK’s railways.
For ELG to create a product from incoming waste, which in most cases is from either the US or Asia, to ship material here, to recover the fibre, to convert it into the form in which it is to be used, takes less than 10% of the energy required to make primary carbon fibre tow. If you accept that the virgin carbon fibre has been made anyway and the eco-footprint of that has already been expended, then this is purely creating value from a waste stream.
The partnership puzzle
Barnes admits that one of the main tasks that sits on his desk is relationship management because ELG is one part in a larger jigsaw. The company needs to have very good relationships with all the other elements involved, from the feedstock side and materials use. Sometimes it is a supplier and sometimes it is a customer: it’s quite a complex supply chain.
The virgin carbon fibre manufacturers think of ELG as competition, but actually it’s really a critical and complimentary part of the industry, because without a recycling solution, the potential for virgin carbon fibre manufacture is limited and equally, like the rail and automotive projects it is working on, the structural manufactured solution uses a combination of virgin and recycled fibres. You can’t make the whole structure from recycled materials because of the mechanical properties limit, and you can’t make the whole structure from virgin carbon fibre because of the cost limit.
There are more companies moving into this area, and ELG sees this as good for the sector - and good for the technical competitiveness of this part of it. ELG has a planned five-year global footprint, producing around 6,000 tonnes a year of recycled carbon fibre products at a point when it believes there will be 32,000 tonnes of carbon fibre waste available in the market. One of Barnes’ concerns is that the projections for carbon fibre demand over that period exceed the capacity of the market to produce this. The reuse of current waste streams therefore becomes a necessity.
Much of ELG’s current R&D effort is in processing of cured laminates rather than tow offcuts. This is reprocessing composite tooling and part trim waste, which is fairly consistent, although it has conducted end-of-life studies on four vehicles for a number of car manufacturers. A production solution for the initial size reduction process has to be automated before it goes to the shredder. Technical feasibility has been demonstrated, but this production solution isn’t quite there yet. In 5-10 years, this is when the volume automotive markets start to kick in.
The company is in a massive growth phase. It has been trying to straighten out the whole of the supply chain for recycling of carbon fibres, within the eternal triangular relationship between material, process, and product, which really means that ELG has to understand not just what its immediate customers are wanting, but what its customers’ customers need. It is mechanical properties and the cost at the end of the day: engineering, economics and energy – and ELG now ticks all these boxes.
