Sustainability of composite materials in the EMR region

After the welcome of participants by Bernard Paquet, project coordinator, Gunnar Seide, Prof.Dr. Full professor at Faculty of Science and Engineering at AMIBM, introduced the first key speaker Petya Yaneva from SABIC. Mrs Yanewa started the morning session by a presentation on innovative products with high performances for structural applications with excellent stiffness and strength, good dimensional stability, low warpage for producing thin wall parts and potential weight savings, lowering the molded part weight, and optimizing material cost and cycle times.

Maurice Huysman presented the Brightlands Chemelot Campus ecosystem and their strategy to develop circular feedstock and sustainable processes by new value chains by young companies that are present today on the campus with disruptive technologies. The Chemelot Circular Hub brings together business, research, education, and labor market to create unique upscaling and debottlenecking know-how and facilities.

Marc Vanhoomissen, CEO from VERAMTEX shows to public the development of a Fire and Ageing Resistant Biocomposite for Transportation industry (FARBioTY project). VERAMTEX developed in this project an innovative process that can be applied on any fabric made of cellulose made of cellulose ( flax , hemp , jute,…) or cellulose blend (eg cotton polyester) with no mechanical resistance loss. The development opens new market perspectives for natural fiber reinforcement for bio composites. The development targets applications by the use of natural fibers for energy wind blades, the building sector, the naval sector, the Automotive sector that will be increasingly sensitive to sustainability.

Prof. Gunnar Seide presented the AMIBM mission. Pushing ground-breaking conversion of biomass to biobased materials and into product applications by creating outstanding crossborder teams with synergistic core competences and infrastructure.

After a lunch and networking possibilities between speakers and participants, the participants had the opportunity to visit the laboratories of AMIBM where biomass is converted in Biosourced materials that can then be transformed in a spinnery lab to filaments, yarns and tapes destinated to reinforce composite material. The entire chain from molecule to filament is covered by research activities at AMIBM. Developments at lab scale, pilot scale and technical scale are done.

The design of innovative materials and their state-of-the-art implementation offer great opportunities to SMEs for the development of new products. The objective of the AACOMA project, an Interreg Euregio-Meuse-Rhin project, which runs for 3 years until mid of 2023 with a budget of 3M€, is to network SMEs with technological research partners.

Seven partners from the three countries are carrying out the project: CENTEXBEL is the project leader and is supported by the University of Liège, SIRRIS and Flanders Make in Belgium, as well as from FONTYS, the University of Applied Sciences and AMIBM from Maastricht University in the Netherlands and AMAC in Germany.