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

先进复合材料已广泛用于从航空航天、汽车到可再生能源领域的高性能轻量化应用，到2017年，全球复合材料产品市场超过600亿英镑，自2011年以来复合年增长率为7%，预计到2030年英国工业复合材料销售额将增长100亿英镑。随着对零影响和可持续发展的需求不断增加，应考虑从复合材料生产到其报废选择的每个阶段的环境影响，以利用复合材料行业的高增长率。对于该行业的清洁增长来说，仍然存在三个重要问题：（1）我们如何以环境可持续的方式制造复合材料，即减少快速增长的生产需求的能源消耗;（2）如何有效地减少，回收和回收使用寿命结束的复合材料废物中的有价值的材料;（3）如何真实地揭示复合材料的轻量化特征，减少复合材料的超设计，同时避免结构意外的灾难性失效。该项目将通过材料和制造创新来解决这三个问题，通过提供一种基于回收复合材料废物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。与现有制造方法相比，能耗仅为1%，甚至不需要烘箱就能制造出具有变形和损伤传感以及除冰等集成新功能的高性能复合材料。这种新方法将被调整，以完全符合现有高性能复合材料系统的加工要求，降低资本投资，运营和维护方面的成本。新功能亦会提供组件结构完整性的实时健康监测，以确保高可靠性的状态维修。（美国WMG、沃里克大学和马萨诸塞州理工学院）和英国工业界（ELG Carbon fibers Ltd和LMK Thermosafe Ltd）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，确保该项目取得巨大成功，并对相关研究领域产生重大影响，并为应对英国“清洁增长”和“未来移动性”的重大挑战以及英国经济的国际竞争力做出直接贡献，在运输，制造业和有效利用资源的轻量化方面取得世界领先的发展。

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.