Conceptions and Feasibility Study of Fiber Orientation in the Melt as Part of a Completely Circular Recycling Concept for Fiber-Reinforced Thermoplastics

Fiber-reinforced thermoplastics are an important construction material for lightweight applications. The increasing use of especially glass fiber-reinforced plastics leads to growing amounts of not recyclable composite materials, which is commonly disposed of by landfilling. Hence, there is a need for a recycling concept for glass-fiber-reinforced plastics that enables their complete reuse over many recycling cycles. In this paper, such a recycling concept is presented, which is based on the idea of melting the whole glass-fiber-reinforced component without prior size reduction. The fiber-reinforced melt will be pressed through a nozzle in order to achieve a strand with highly oriented fibers that can then be applied in new components via a tape-like laying process. The feasibility of the recycling concept is proved in this paper. Therefore, investigations on the reorientation of fibers in the melt by pressing through a rectangular nozzle have been carried out with different nozzle diameters, shear rates and melt temperatures. The investigations result in a stable process, which enables an increase in fiber orientation of about 37% up to a mean fiber orientation of 67% in the flow direction. These findings are independent of the initial fiber orientation.