New Polymer Manufacturing Process Slashes Energy Use By 90%

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The essence of commerce is selling stuff, but before you sell stuff you have to make stuff. Sometimes, making stuff consumes a lot of energy. Finding new ways to lower energy usage is important to reducing the carbon footprint of the products you manufacture.

polymer A case in point is manufacturing commercial aircraft and large vehicles. The process of curing just one section for such vehicles can consume over 96,000 kilowatt-hours of energy and produce more than 80 tons of carbon dioxide. That’s according to Scott White, one member of a team of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. That’s roughly the amount of electricity needed to supply nine single family homes for one year, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

“The airliner manufacturers use a curing oven that is about 60 feet in diameter and about 40 feet long — it is an incredibly massive structure filled with heating elements, fans, cooling pipes and all sorts of other complex machinery,” White says. “The temperature is raised to about 350 degrees Fahrenheit in a series of very precise steps over a roughly 24-hour cycle. It is an incredibly energy-intensive process.”

The researchers say they have found a way to make heat set polymer parts for cars, trucks, buses, and airplanes that uses one tenth as much electricity. “There is plenty of energy stored in the resin’s chemical bonds to fuel the process,” Moore said. “Learning to unleash this energy at just the right rate — not too fast, but not too slow — was key to the discovery.

“By touching what is essentially a soldering iron to one corner of the polymer surface, we can start a cascading chemical-reaction wave that propagates throughout the material,” says White. “Once triggered, the reaction uses enthalpy, or the internal energy of the polymerization reaction, to push the reaction forward and cure the material, rather than an external energy source. This development marks what could be the first major advancement to the high-performance polymer and composite manufacturing industry in almost half a century.”

The team has demonstrated that this reaction can produce safe, high quality polymers in a well controlled laboratory environment. Because it is compatible with commonly used fabrication techniques like molding, imprinting, 3-D printing, and resin infusion, the researchers envision the process being applicable to large scale production, according to Science Daily. The research findings have been published recently in the journal Nature.

For those interested in electric cars, trucks, and buses that have a lower well-to-wheel carbon footprint and have longer range due to reduced weight, the new manufacturing process is very welcome news.


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Steve Hanley

Steve writes about the interface between technology and sustainability from his home in Florida or anywhere else The Force may lead him. He is proud to be "woke" and doesn't really give a damn why the glass broke. He believes passionately in what Socrates said 3000 years ago: "The secret to change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old but on building the new." You can follow him on Substack and LinkedIn but not on Fakebook or any social media platforms controlled by narcissistic yahoos.

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