ESTEEM: Energy efficient and Safe out-of-oven manufacTuring for compositE materials with intEgrated Multifunctionalities

先进复合材料已被广泛应用于航空航天、汽车和可再生能源等高性能轻量化应用领域，到2017年，全球复合材料产品市场超过600亿GB，自2011年以来的复合年增长率为7%，预计到2030年，复合材料在英国工业的销售额将增长100亿GB。但是，随着对零影响和可持续发展的需求不断增加，应该考虑从复合材料生产到其报废选择的每个阶段对环境的影响，以利用复合材料行业的这种高增长率。对于该行业的清洁增长仍然存在三个重要问题：(1)如何以环境可持续的方式制造复合材料，即如何减少快速增长的生产需求所需的能源消耗；(2)如何有效地减少、回收和回收使用寿命结束时产生的有价值的材料；(3)如何真正显示复合材料的轻量化特征，减少复合材料的过度设计，同时避免意外的灾难性结构故障。该项目将通过材料和制造创新来解决这三个问题，通过提供一种基于可回收复合材料废料作为新功能填料的极其节能和本质安全的制造方法，为复合材料行业创造循环经济。与当前的制造方法相比，仅需1%的能源消耗，就可以制造出集成了变形和损伤传感以及除冰等新功能的高性能复合材料，甚至不需要烤箱。这一新方法将进行调整，以完全符合现有高性能复合系统的处理要求，降低资本投资、运营和维护方面的成本。新功能还将提供部件结构完整性的实时健康监测，以实现高可靠性的状态维护。这项研究将得到学术界(WMG、华威大学和美国麻省理工学院)和英国工业界(ELG碳纤维有限公司和LMK ThermoSafe Ltd)的强大联合支持，他们拥有从聚合物和纳米复合材料加工、智能复合材料到碳纤维回收和本质安全加热应用的领先专业知识，以确保项目的巨大成功和对相关研究领域的巨大影响。并为应对英国面临的重大挑战“清洁增长”和“机动性的未来”以及英国经济的国际竞争力做出直接贡献，在交通运输、制造业和资源高效利用方面的轻量化发展处于世界领先地位。

Advanced composites have been used extensively in high performance lightweight applications ranging from aerospace, automotive to renewable energy sectors, with a global market of composite products over £60bn by 2017 together with a compound annual growth rate of 7% since 2011, and a projected £10bn growth in sales of composites in UK industry by 2030.However, with the ever increasing demand for zero-impact and sustainable development, the environmental impact of each stage from composite production to their end-of-life options should be considered to take the advantage of this high growth rate in the composite sector. Three important questions remain for the clean growth of the sector: (1) how can we manufacture the composites in an environmentally sustainable way, i.e. reduce the energy consumption for the rapid growing production needs; (2) how to effectively reduce, recycle, and reclaim valuable materials from end-of-life composite wastes; (3) how to truly reveal the lightweight feature of composites and reduce the overdesign in composites while avoiding unexpected catastrophic structural failures. This project will address all three questions by materials and manufacturing innovation, creating a circular economy for the composite industry by providing an extremely energy efficient and intrinsically safe manufacturing method based on recycled composite wastes as new functional fillers.With only 1% of energy consumption compared to current manufacturing methods, high performance composites with integrated new functions like deformation and damage sensing as well as de-icing will be manufactured without needs of even an oven. This new method will be tuned to fully comply with the processing requirements of existing high performance composite systems, reducing costs in capital investment, operational, and maintenance aspects. The new functions will also provide real-time health monitoring of components' structural integrity to enable condition based maintenance with high reliability.This research will be supported by a strong joint force from both academia (WMG, University of Warwick, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US) and UK industry (ELG Carbon fibres Ltd, and LMK Thermosafe Ltd), with leading expertise from polymer and nanocomposite processing, smart composites, to carbon fibre recycling and intrinsically safe heating applications, to ensure a great success of the project and a large impact on relevant research fields, as well as a direct contribution to addressing the UK Grand Challenges of "clean growth" and "future of mobility" and international competitiveness of the UK economy, with world leading development in lightweighting in transportation, manufacturing and efficient use of resources.