Welcome to …

The South West Composites Gateway/ Advanced Composites Manufacturing CentreWorkshop onLife Cycle Assessment of Composites

My background …

• UWIST (now Cardiff) BSc chemistry/polymer

• Thames (now Greenwich)MSc physics of materials

• Plymouth PhD hybrid composites

• RNEC HMS Thunderer composite structures

• Plymouth ACMC comp. manufacturing

• Plymouth PGDipEd (Adult Ed.)• increasing interest in quality/

sustainability issues

My background (continued)

• CEng Chartered Engineer• CEnvChartered Environmentalist• CSci Chartered Scientist• FIMMM, FInstNDT, FIAQP

• EPSRC Peer Review College• CIMNFC Programme Steering Committee• DTI Technology Programme assessor• FP6 BioComp reviewer

Advanced Composites Manufacturing Centre

• composites research in Plymouth since 1967

• focus on manufacturing since the 1980s• NAB-funded ACMC launched 1987• BEng Composite Engineering since 1990• BSc Marine and Composites Tech since

2001• CPD for industry >2500 delegates

Commercial activity… some examples

Sustainability

• Brundtland: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs".

• Three (or four) “pillars”:• Economic• Environmental• Social• Governance

Mankind is her/hisown worst enemy• Population over 7 billion and rising• “world population peaks at 9.22

billion in 2075” (World Population to 2300,United Nations, 2004)

• “10.9 billion by 2100” (World Population Prospects: The 2012 Revision, United Nations, 2013)

From UN 2013 report …

Resources …

• are finite as we have only one planet• every additional person will expect

their fair share of the total

10.9b/7b is a 56% increase one fair share is reduced to 64% of the total resource

Do not do (the wrong) things right,but do the right thing

Rant over …

… but for the composites industry we need life cycle assessment/analysis:• thermosets vs thermoplastics• natural vs man-made fibres

… to satisfy all stakeholders… and to provide quantitative evidence that the chosen route is the correct choice

Philosophy TodayMarch 2005

• Ben Basing on Our Responsibility to Future Generations

• “… the major issue in valuing thingsfor future generations, is the fact thatdifferent people value the same thing differentlyand the same person might give the same thing different values at different times …..we will have real problems trying to assesswhat will be of value to people livingin an inevitably changed world”.

Thermoplastics vsthermosets• Thermoplastics

+ recycle at similar duty- high process temperatures- use limited to process temperature -

200°C• Thermosets

+ low process temperatures+ usable at temperatures close to process- re-use limited as fillers

Natural vsman-made fibres• Natural

+ Carbon neutral- fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides- variable quality- dispersed production

• Man-made fibres+ uniformity of product- high-energy production processes

• Nilmini Dissanayake, PhD, Plymouth, 2011• Life cycle assessment of flax fibres for the

reinforcement of polymer matrix composites• http://www.tech.plym.ac.uk/sme/acmc/lca.htm

End of life

• Reuse• Design for dis-assembly• Recycle• Pyrolysis• Incineration• Composting• but biogas is ~60-65% CH4, 35% CO2

• Landfill

Drivers:producer responsibility• End of Life Vehicles (ELV) Directive

(2000/53/EC) • Waste Electrical and Electronic

Equipment (WEEE) Directive (2002/96/EC)o largely driven by landfill considerationso thermosets are difficult to recycle o but thermoplastics use high temp

processes

Life cycle assessment

• very diverse options are available for the design and manufacture of composites

• most LCA are qualitative• can we compare chalk and cheese

in a quantitative way ?

… penultimate slide

from QCC Code of Conduct

• “the only stupid questionis the one that is not asked”

• Samuel Ho “Operations and Quality Management” Thomson Business Press, 1999, page 197.

Programme• 10:00 Jerry Corless

Welcome and introductions• 10:10 John Summerscales (ACMC)

The context for the meeting• 10:40 Andrew Norton (Renuables)

Life Cycle Assessment• 11:10 Tea break• 11:30 Flavie Lowres (BRE)

Life Cycle Assessment• 12:00 Ian Hamerton (University of Surrey)

Thermoplastics vs thermosetting resins for composites• 12:30 Lunch• 13:30 Stephen Pickering (University of Nottingham)

Routes to recycling or disposal of thermoset composites• 14:00 SimaPro software demonstration• 15:00 Networking and informal discussions • 16:00 Close