Aircraft decommissioning and recycling is a multi-disciplinary process, with environmental, operational, safety, legal and economic aspects. The number of aircraft retirements has been increasing steadily over the last decades.

Nowadays, composite materials are gradually gaining relevance in the aeronautic sector. Their excellent mechanical properties, as well as their reduced density make them a suitable material to reduce the aircraft weight while respecting the mechanical requirements of the metallic materials they are replacing.

These days, metal is the main component of aircraft parts but, for the last few years, the aeronautical industry has been incorporating new materials, such as thermoset compounds. They require a recycling system that allows the extraction of the reusable components (carbon fiber), to produce less waste of this composite material, which is hardly recyclable until now. HELACS offers a technological solution to recycle both thermoset materials and thermoplastics, which are currently booming and are considered to be the materials of the coming future for aircrafts.

HELACS project aims to develop a dual methodology of controlled integral dismantling, to enable the classification, recycling and reuse of aircraft parts made of thermosetting and thermoplastic composite materials.

CENTEXBEL, member of the HELACS Consortium, presented the project innovations at the 3rd International Conference “Circular Economy for textiles and plastics”.