About
Background
Natural fibre materials (NFMs) find their applications in many everyday scenarios: from scaffolding and fillers within construction to lightweighting within structural composites to secondary and tertiary packaging of food and consumer products.
For example, within the 1044 Bn€ packaging market (with average CGR of 4.0% in the period 2021-2026), the sustainable packaging market is currently valued at 274 Bn€ industry and expected to grow to 414 Bn€ by end 2027 with an CAGR of +8.6%. The demand for these NFMs is set to increase by 300% by 2050, in part due to the 2030 Zero Pollution targets of the EU.
In most cases, these NFMs are recyclable multiple times and are often based on renewable/circular sources e.g. the recyclability within the packaging and paper industry in EU is averaged at >60% with a goal of reaching 70% by 2030 through Extender Producer Responsibility policies. Within other industrial sectors, their recyclability is largely curtailed as the natural fibres are often used as fillers/ reinforcement for composites together with traditional thermoplastic or thermoset materials as the matrix.
Ensuring sustainability of the NFM solutions necessitates development of new bio-degradable polymeric fibre and matrix materials (e.g. BioIgenox) suitable for structural applications. To enable the fast uptake of these materials in society, there is a further need for ensuring that future designers, engineers and researchers have cross-disciplinary competences in designing high-quality components with these materials as well as the competences to ensure the scalable and cost-effective production of such components.
Currently, there is a lack of opportunity for such cross-disciplinary training, and thus a lack in highly skilled workforce that can enable the needed fast & scaled transition to NFMs.
The challenge
A detailed understanding of the behaviour of new NFMs in production and design implications for Moulded Fibre Products (MFPs).
The new NFMs emerging from various EU-sponsored initiatives are difficult to process using existing production lines for moulded fibre products.
The new NFMs exhibit varied polymerization and agglomeration behaviour, different rheological and moisture absorption/retention properties, vastly different thermal degradation behaviour, composition-dependent result-ant strength (compressive, flexural, tensile and fatigue) and different reusability/recyclability limits.
Thus, most NFMs need to be optimized with respect to the components being produced, but a rigorous testing driven optimization is economically infeasible.
The opportunities offered by multi-scale multi-physics simulations and advanced AI based methods for understanding and capturing the behaviour of such new materials is well-known.
However, high quality data during actual production with NFMs and extensive well-designed testing (of NFMs and produced MFPs) is necessary for calibrating and validating such models, necessitating a production machine-level access. Subsequently, engineering tools need to be developed for virtual analysis when designing MFPs with the new NFMs, especially ensuring robust methods of scalability to new NFMs that will continue to emerge.
These tools should also be able to interact with workflows allowing for rapid tooling with 3D printing allowing ramped-up production of MFPs. Finally, the corresponding virtual and physical systems for production monitoring and control need to be developed and integrated onto production lines, allowing for a six-sigma standard production.
