Recycling Technology Of Wasted Fiberglass Reinforced Plastics

Recycle of Fiberglass Reinforced Plastics(FRP) has long been an old problem with the rapid development of FRP industry, Wasted FRP is not only a pollutant to the environment, but also waste of resources. Therefore, it is necessary to search for an efficient and economic way toward the reuse of the wasted FRP.In china, the commonly used method of reusing FRP is pulverization, and the resulting FRP power was used as filling materials for the production of BMC or SMC. The traditional method needs grading pulverizer, which is of high energy consumption and equipment investment. In this thesis, we proposed a new method for crushing the wasted FRP, viz. swelling pre-treatment first and then crushing. The FRP with swelling pre-treatment can be crushed easily, because the toughness and strength of FRP is reduced greatly, and accordingly the energy consumption and investment on pulverizer.This paper consists of three parts. The first part is related to the determination of the swelling pretreatment condition. For this purpose, the influence of the following factor on the swelling degree of the FRP is studied, viz. organic solvent, time, temperature, and FRP type. The optimal swelling conditions were determined for three types of wasted FRP by comparing the swelling rate and degree of the FRP along with a systemic analysis on the experimental results.The second part is associated with the selection of an appropriate pulverizer for crushing the FRP pretreated via swelling. Four kinds of crushing equipments were analyzed and compared in term of their characteristics, and a feasible pulverizer is recommended, meanwhile, the potential problem to be encountered in the crushing process is analyzed.The last part is connected with the reuse of the FRP power. Firstly the FRP power was added to BMC test samples as a filler replacement of power CaCO3, and the mechanical properties of the samples were measured. The results show that the FRP powder can be used as a promising filler substitute of CaCO3. Second, the size effect of the glass fiber on FRP was studied by comparing the mechanical strength of the FRP samples prepared with different sizes of glass fibers. Finally, the feasibility of recycling epoxy resin from wasted FRP was studied by using glycol as solvent and NaOH or Na2CO3 as catalyst. The optimum condition for epoxy recycle is as follow:glycol 150 g, temperature 240℃, time 4 h, catalyst (NaOH) 5 g. The recovery rate of resin was 93.1%.