Innovative Biotechnological Process Revolutionizes Carbon Fiber Recycling

roderickasnnb · před 11 hodinami

Carbon-fiber materials are now commonly used in a wide range of products, from sports equipment to passenger airliners. With the global production of carbon fiber reaching hundreds of thousands of tons annually, scientists have been working on developing cost-effective methods to recycle this material. However, recycling carbon fiber into new, useful products has proven particularly challenging due to its tough structure.

"The material is usually a woven fabric combined with a matrix, often made from epoxy or polystyrene," explained Berl Oakley, Irving S. Johnson Distinguished Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Kansas. "The challenge is to separate and recover the fabric for reuse while dissolving the matrix without creating toxic or wasteful byproducts. The goal is to reclaim value from it."

Now, Oakley and collaborators at the University of Southern California have developed a groundbreaking chemical process for breaking down and removing the matrix from carbon fiber reinforced polymers (CFRPs). Their method recovers carbon fiber plies with mechanical properties comparable to new materials.

One of the main products from breaking down the matrix is benzoic acid. To add further value, Oakley has engineered a genetically modified version of the fungus Aspergillus nidulans, which feeds on benzoic acid to produce a valuable compound called OTA (2Z,4Z,6E)-octa-2,4,6-trienoic acid. According to Oakley and his team, this marks the first system to reclaim significant value from both the fiber fabric and polymer matrix of CFRPs.

Oakley has long worked with Clay Wang, the paper's lead author from the University of Southern California. "We've been collaborating for years on producing secondary metabolites from Aspergillus nidulans," Oakley said. "Secondary metabolites are compounds the fungus produces, such as penicillin, which have biological activity. The Asperlin pathway is one such example, and OTA is an intermediate in this pathway, showing great potential as a valuable industrial compound."

"OTA can be used to create products with potential medical applications, like antibiotics or anti-inflammatory drugs," Wang said. "This discovery is important because it demonstrates a more efficient way to convert what was previously considered waste material into something valuable for medicine."

Looking ahead, Oakley plans to further optimize the fungus used in this process in his KU lab, focusing on improving efficiency for scalability and profitability, which are crucial for applying this carbon fiber recycling method on an industrial scale.

"We've developed new strains that outperform the original ones," Oakley noted. "These improved strains will likely yield better results, but we still need to conduct significant work to integrate this process with the enhanced strains."

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Innovative Biotechnological Process Revolutionizes Carbon Fiber Recycling

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