The High Performance Discontinuous Fibre (HiPerDiF) technology for consistent quality control of reclaimed carbon fibres

This paper describes the ongoing development of an alternative, improved method for the quality control of reclaimed carbon fibres based on materials manufactured with the HiPerDiF method. The HiPerDiF method, invented at the University of Bristol, allows remanufacturing aligned short fibre specimens that are representative of unidirectional composites manufactured from reclaimed carbon fibres (rCF). Two different specimen types are taken into consideration: 100% rCF and interlaminated hybrid specimens made of a layer of aligned short rCF sandwiched between continuous glass fibres. The obtained failure strain results are compared with results obtained from single fibre tensile test (SFTT): the interlaminated hybrid specimens allow avoiding premature failure caused by stress concentration in the end-tab region. Further work is needed to be able to efficiently retrieve the stiffness related properties.