EVERGREEN PROJECT

Reprocessable, Repairable and Recyclable composites: in the past 2 years, Epsilon Composite was involved in the EVERGREEN project, to develop and industrialize vitrimers.

What’s a “vitrimer”?
A class of next-generation materials that combine the advantages of thermoset and thermoplastic polymers.

They possess the strength, durability and chemical resistance of thermosets from which they derive, with the inherent reversible chemistry that makes them reprocessable and allow end of life recyclability, like thermoplastics.

This groundbreaking 18 month long partnership with Airbus, Safran, Solvay IRT AESE – Saint Exupéry and ADI Composites focused on several goals:

• Work on current epoxy resins chemistry to make vitrimers
• Develop vitrimer composites processability on various manufacturing processes (such as pultrusion)
• Assess self-repair, moulding, welding and recycling capabilities of vitrimers.

The project led to very promising results, with processing in pultrusion as well as proofs of concept for postforming, repair and recylability.
Many challenges remain and will be tackled by the launch of EVERGREEN2 to further advance the technology and manufacturing maturity.

We would like to thank all the team involved and all our partners in this project for their outstanding work.