Awaiting Public Project Summary

This project will mature and validate a range of innovative materials and processes to underpin a future wide-body Business Class (BC) seat to be known as "EcoSuite" and to enable substantial enhancements to Wide-body First Class (FC) bespoke seats. The innovations introduced via EcoSuite are aimed at addressing market concerns around weight, environmental impact, lead-time and cost. Realisation of the EcoSuite will require the project to mature a range of sustainable and lightweight materials, develop and refine new efficient manufacturing processes, and validate the new material and process technologies via the integration of the new technologies into EcoSuite demonstrators.

There is increasing industrial, regulatory and consumer demand for the use of greener alternatives across a range of everyday products, with a particular focus on formulated non-food items. It is also a key strategy for the UK government and manufacturers to use biobased alternatives to petrochemical-derived ingredients across the chemical industry. Bio-refining of a range of low-value biomass residues offers a way to produce intermediate chemicals to replace fossil-based materials, whilst simultaneously increasing their value and reducing their impact on the environment. However, current biorefining technologies are wasteful, inefficient and often unprofitable. Bio-Sep, using its novel, patented ultrasonic processing technology, aims to make a step-change in biorefining while stimulating investments in the UK bioeconomy. In collaboration with a strong consortium of global leaders in process innovation, chemicals, composites and automotives, Bio-Sep aims to optimise the Sonichem technology for specific, renewable, consistent, and widely-available UK biomass and generate platform chemicals directly relevant to the paints, coatings, cosmetics, construction, resins, pharmaceuticals, and additives markets. The consortium will explore the use of lignin to pioneer composite resin formulations that contain high-levels of renewable, non-petrochemical content, and utilise low-carbon feedstocks. As part of the project, applications of this material to composites for automotive applications will be investigated. The main outcome of the project will be optimised and validated ultrasonic fractionation of UK biomass residues, achieved in a commercially-viable and environmentally-sustainable manner under mild operating conditions, to produce high-quality lignin. The lignin will be demonstrated as suitable for the production of renewable, low carbon and bio-based feedstocks for composite materials relevant to the automotive sector. These outcomes allow Bio-Sep to provide a basis for the scaling of the innovation, promote the Sonichem biorefinery concept more widely, and advance subsequent commercialisation with exploitation partners across the chemicals industry.

This project is a collaboration between SHD Composite Materials Ltd and Sheffield University (AMRC) with Lotus cars as end user. The object is to develop a multi-functional, sustainable composite material meeting the thermal and structural requirements of EV battery boxes whilst fulfilling the requirements for rate of manufacture and cost dictated by Lotus for next-generation vehicles.

Using sustainable, high performance resins to produce aero engine components from unidirectional carbon fibre prepreg at the rates required for high volume manufacture.

FlexiComp proposes to research the technical and commercial feasibility of a flexible, rapid and cost effective composite processing technology for a multitude of different applications from transport to medical and everything in between. The ultimate aim is to produce a high quality composite part from a range of prepreg composite materials within a thirty minute cycle time without using an autoclave or expensive tooling. FlexiComp proposes to provide a significant reduction in processing cost and capital cost to enable carbon fibre (and other prepregs) to be cost effectively commercialised in numerous low volume (and potentially high volume) applications.

This project aims to develop materials that when incorporated into composite structures, provides those composite materials with the ability to “bruise” or show a visible indication that the material has suffered damage.

To develop additive materials for development of new composite pre-pregs which will lead to products with novel characteristics and enhanced sustainability

The CARBIO project will develop automotive structures with reduced weight, cost, environmental impact and improved noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) by the incorporation of novel flax-bioepoxy composites into carbon fibre components. The need to reduce vehicle weight is leading to the adoption of carbon fibre, which is expensive, energy/CO2 intensive, difficult to recycle and can lead to poor NVH. Flax fibres are low cost, renewable, CO2 neutral and have excellent vibration damping properties, whilst bio-based epoxy resins offer enhanced toughness and sustainability over synthetic epoxies. This project will develop and optimise flax/carbon hybrid biocomposite materials and test them according to automotive OEM specifications. A number of case study parts, such as a door, wheel arch panel and seat structure, will be designed and validation parts will be produced and tested.