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Recycling
Volume 10
Issue 2
10.3390/recycling10020055
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Article

Optimization of the Recycling Process for Aligned Short Carbon Fiber TuFF Composites

by
Uday Kiran Balaga
1,
Aydin Gunes
1,2,
Tekin Ozdemir
1,
Chris Blackwell
3,
Mark Davis
3,
Steven Sauerbrunn
1,
Lukas Fuessel
1,
Joseph M. Deitzel
1 and
Dirk Heider
1,3,*
1
Center for Composite Materials, University of Delaware, 101 Academy St, Newark, DE 19716, USA
2
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Abdullah Gul University, Kayseri 38080, Turkey
3
Composites Automation LLC, University of Delaware, 7 McMillan Way, Newark, DE 19713, USA
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Recycling 2025, 10(2), 55; https://doi.org/10.3390/recycling10020055
Submission received: 17 February 2025 / Revised: 24 March 2025 / Accepted: 26 March 2025 / Published: 1 April 2025
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Challenges and Opportunities in Plastic Waste Management)
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Abstract

Recycling of carbon fibers enables a sustainable feedstock for industrial applications of high-performance composite materials. This allows light weighting with recycled carbon fibers due to their superior mechanical properties while reducing the high embodied energy and cost of virgin carbon fiber composites. This study optimizes a pyrolysis cycle for fiber recovery of an aerospace-grade thermoset prepreg and a cleaning (oxidation) step to minimize fiber degradation and left-over resin residue, enabling dispersion and alignment of the recycled, discontinuous fibers in the Tailorable Universal Feedstock for Forming alignment process. The study balances the influence of the optimized thermal cycle (pyrolysis + oxidation step) on recycled carbon fiber strength retention with the ability to disperse at the filament level to create aligned, recycled carbon fiber composite samples with high fiber volume fraction. The optimized thermal cycle for efficient fiber recovery applied a pyrolysis step at 500 °C for 4 h in an inert gas environment and an additional oxidation step at the same temperature for 100 min. This resulted in ~20% strength degradation of the fiber compared to the virgin fiber. The processed recycled composite achieved 44% fiber volume fraction with full modulus translation (~128 GPa) compared to the virgin continuous composite with strength translation (~870 MPa), reaching ~50%.
Keywords: carbon fiber recycling; pyrolysis; oxidation; short fiber aligned composites; Tailored Universal Feedstock for Forming (TuFF) carbon fiber recycling; pyrolysis; oxidation; short fiber aligned composites; Tailored Universal Feedstock for Forming (TuFF)

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MDPI and ACS Style

Balaga, U.K.; Gunes, A.; Ozdemir, T.; Blackwell, C.; Davis, M.; Sauerbrunn, S.; Fuessel, L.; Deitzel, J.M.; Heider, D. Optimization of the Recycling Process for Aligned Short Carbon Fiber TuFF Composites. Recycling 2025, 10, 55. https://doi.org/10.3390/recycling10020055

AMA Style

Balaga UK, Gunes A, Ozdemir T, Blackwell C, Davis M, Sauerbrunn S, Fuessel L, Deitzel JM, Heider D. Optimization of the Recycling Process for Aligned Short Carbon Fiber TuFF Composites. Recycling. 2025; 10(2):55. https://doi.org/10.3390/recycling10020055

Chicago/Turabian Style

Balaga, Uday Kiran, Aydin Gunes, Tekin Ozdemir, Chris Blackwell, Mark Davis, Steven Sauerbrunn, Lukas Fuessel, Joseph M. Deitzel, and Dirk Heider. 2025. "Optimization of the Recycling Process for Aligned Short Carbon Fiber TuFF Composites" Recycling 10, no. 2: 55. https://doi.org/10.3390/recycling10020055

APA Style

Balaga, U. K., Gunes, A., Ozdemir, T., Blackwell, C., Davis, M., Sauerbrunn, S., Fuessel, L., Deitzel, J. M., & Heider, D. (2025). Optimization of the Recycling Process for Aligned Short Carbon Fiber TuFF Composites. Recycling, 10(2), 55. https://doi.org/10.3390/recycling10020055

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