Today, carbon-fiber materials are nearly ubiquitous within the industrialized world, present in every thing from hockey sticks to passenger airliners. With a whole lot of hundreds of tons of carbon fiber produced all over the world yearly, scientists have sought useful, cost-effective methods for recycling the fabric.
But carbon fiber — strands of carbon atoms bonded together in a matrix — is especially tough to recycle into recent useful materials.
“It’s always a woven material combined with a matrix, often product of epoxy or polystyrene, that holds it together,” said Berl Oakley, Irving S. Johnson Distinguished Professor of Molecular Biology on the University of Kansas. “You’ve gotten a mix of the material and the matrix, so the goal is to get better the material for reuse and likewise dissolve the matrix without creating something toxic or wasteful. Ideally, you desire to reclaim value from it.”
Now, in a brand new biotechnological process just detailed within the Journal of American Chemical Society, Oakley at KU and collaborators on the University of Southern California have developed a chemical procedure for breaking down and removing the matrix from carbon fiber reinforced polymers (CFRPs) such that recovered carbon fiber plies exhibit mechanical properties comparable to those of virgin manufacturing substrates.
One in all the most important matrix breakdown products is benzoic acid, and to get better additional value, Oakley has developed a genetically modified version of the fungus Aspergillusnidulans that may feast on benzoic acid to provide a useful chemical compound called OTA (2Z,4Z,6E)-octa-2,4,6-trienoic acid). In line with Oakley and his collaborators on the brand new paper, “This represents the primary system to reclaim a high value from each the fiber fabric and polymer matrix of a CFRP.”
Oakley is a longtime collaborator with the paper’s lead creator, Clay Wang of the University of Southern California. “We have been working for years together with his lab to provide secondary metabolites in Aspergillusnidulans,” Oakley said. “Secondary metabolites are compounds the fungus produces — penicillin is the archetypal secondary metabolite — which have biological activity, like inhibiting its competitors and so forth. The Asperlin pathway is something that got here out of that work. Asperlin is a secondary metabolite. We managed to activate a selected pathway, and that was the product. We discovered that OTA is an intermediate within the pathway and OTA is a potentially useful industrial compound.”
“OTA could be used to make products with potential medical applications, like antibiotics or anti-inflammatory drugs,” Wang said in a press release issued by USC. “This discovery is vital since it shows a brand new, more efficient solution to turn what was previously considered waste material into something useful that may very well be utilized in medicine.”
Next, Oakley said his KU lab will attempt to make their specialized fungus much more efficient, keeping in mind needs for scalability and profitability if the brand new carbon-fiber recycling method is to be applied at the economic scale.
“Since this work began, we have developed strains which can be actually higher than the unique ones,” he said. “These newer strains will likely give higher results, but we’ll must do a number of work to engineer this process into the improved strains.”
At KU, Oakley was joined within the research by graduate student Cory Jenkinson. At USC, Wang’s co-authors were Clarissa Olivar, Zehan Yu, Ben Miller, Maria Tangalos, Steven Nutt and Travis Williams.
