HELACS, starring in Advanced Factories 2022

Advanced Factories reaffirms, once again, its position within the industrial panorama in southern Europe. It is already a benchmark event in the innovation calendar, and this 2022 has consolidated its success by bringing together more than 20,000 congress attendees who did not want to miss the latest technological solutions in industrial automation, robotics and artificial intelligence.

In this sixth edition, Aragon has been the guest region, thanks to the high level of industrial training it has been attending in recent times, led by companies such as Aitiip Technology Centre. Aitiip, this year's exhibitor at the fair, and also lecturer at the Industry 4.0 Forum, has shown its most revolutionary products, projects, services, which cover different industrial sectors.

During Aitiip’s conference,witnessed, face to face, by hundreds of representatives of the industrial and business fabric, HELACS played a significant role. Aitiip's research director, Berta Gonzalvo, explained to the audience the innovation that HELACS offers to the industry, as a new technology for recycling composite materials of large components.

 

The audience had the opportunity to learn about the HELACS aircraft dismantling system, which is based on the selective disassembly and segmentation of large parts. Thanks to this process, these parts can be then reused in other applications. A circular economy in line with European objectives and the Clean Aviation programme, whose ultimate goal is to promote sustainability in the aviation industry.

In addition, the technology centre had the opportunity to hand out brochures about the project, and to inform representatives of the Spanish industrial sector about its innovations.

Latest News HELACS

  • For aircrafts that are no longer in service, the owner considers the trade-off between direct resale and disassemble & recycled. Besides that, HELACS project (Holistic processes for the cost-effective and sustainable management of End of Life of Aircraft Composite Structures) is focused on the study of the second one of these options.

  • AITIIP Technology Centre leads HELACS, a European project which aims to develop a dual methodology of controlled comprehensive dismantling in order to make possible the classification, recycling and reuse of aircraft parts made of thermoset and thermoplastic composites that have reached their end of life. Annually, the aeronautical industry is depositing more than 40,000 tons of end-of-life composite material waste in landfills. Thanks to the recovery of materials, the technology proposed by HELACS will benefit the change towards an energy efficiency model.

  • You can now download the official HELACS project brochure. A project comes to transform the dismantling process of the aircraft of the future. HELACS employs novel robotics to recycle composite materials of large components. The HELACS process is based on the application of high water pressure that will selectively chop the thermoset parts into a dimension suitable for recycling. In addition, the pyrolysis process is used for the carbonization of the thermoset matrix to reuse the carbon fibers that overcome this chemical decomposition.

This project has received funding from the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement Nº 101007871
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