Product category:
Design and Development Consultancy
News Release from: Brookhouse Holdings
Edited by the Engineeringtalk Editorial
Team on 13 September 2007
Carbon fibre recycling slashes disposal
costs
All of Brookhouse's waste carbon fibre off-cuts are picked up free-of-charge and taken for recycling.
By recycling waste carbon fibre laminations, Brookhouse has eliminated a significant disposal cost, while ensuring that it adheres to its environmental management policy Brookhouse has recently achieved ISO14001 environmental certification for its Darwen manufacturing site
This article was originally published on Engineeringtalk on 6 Jul 2004 at 8.00am (UK)
Related stories
Novel design provides robust lightweight storage
A new doghouse storage box for civil aircraft offers increased strength and robustness and lighter weight.
Composite fairing is a combined effort
The combined expertise of both Brookhouse Composites and Brookhouse Patterns of Darwen, has been used to produce a specialist composite fairing for an aerospace wind tunnel.
The company's environmental management programme covers all aspects of its operations and a major activity within the programme is waste minimisation and recycling.
An important production stage in the manufacture of composite components at Brookhouse is the development of multi-ply, pre-preg carbon fibre laminations, which are then cured at high temperature and pressure in autoclaves.
Often this development task must be carried out manually using master models and mould tools.
Naturally, it is a very time-consuming operation and can often produce wastage of expensive pre-preg material.
Brookhouse addressed this problem some time ago by investing in automated ply cutting, where the machine software can plan cutting operations so that individual pre-preg templates can be nested within rolls of material.
This allows complete sets of templates for components to be manufactured and, by better material utilisation, can save up to 10% in material costs.
However, there is still unavoidable material wastage and, formerly, this was transported off-site for incineration at an annual cost of GBP 38,000.
However, investigation revealed that carbon fibre materials were being recycled by a UK company.
Contact was made, an assessment of the waste material was carried out and now all waste carbon fibre off-cuts are picked up from Brookhouse free-of-charge and taken for recycling.
As a result, the company does not have pay the annual disposal charge and a valuable material is able to be re-used.
• Brookhouse Holdings: contact details and other news
• Email this article to a colleague
• Register for the free Engineeringtalk email newsletter
• Engineeringtalk Home Page
Search the Pro-Talk network of sites
