FiberEUse: A Funded Project Towards the Reuse of the End-of-Life Fiber Reinforced Composites with Nondestructive Inspection

FiberEUse is a €9.8 million research project funded by the European Union since June 2017 and collaborating with 20 partners from 7 EU countries. It aims at developing different innovative solutions towards enhancing the profitability of glass and carbon fiber reinforced polymer composites (GFRP and CFRP) recycling and reuse in added-value products and high-tech applications. There are three big tasks: (i) mechanical recycling of short GFRP, (ii) thermal recycling of long fibers (both GFRP and CFRP), (iii) inspection, repairing and remanufacturing for the end-of-life (EoL) GFRP/CFRP products. As one of the partners, the main objective of our work is to design a nondestructive testing (NDT) method for recycled/repaired/remanufactured CFRP products based on hyperspectral imagery (HSI). In this paper, we will introduce the use of hyperspectral imaging for erosion detection in different materials. Our previous work on metal corrosion estimation will be discussed first. Then, the idea of this work is carried out. The experimental setup of both works is illustrated and more details of our strategy are provided with future development direction.