A few days ago, the Belgian honeycomb sandwich material manufacturer EconCore has cooperated with Flaxco to develop a new thermoplastic honeycomb sandwich panel.
Flaxco was established in the 1850s, focusing on the development and application of flax fiber weaving technology. Now it has developed into the production and manufacture of flax fiber for composite materials. The main products are intermediate products such as sandwich panels.
In 2020, Flaxco began approaching EconCore with a proposal to combine flax fibers with thermoplastic honeycomb technology. According to EconCore, the polypropylene honeycomb material has excellent mechanical properties and energy absorption properties. With flax fiber fabric composite material as the skin and polypropylene honeycomb as the core material, the two companies are the first in the world to use flax fiber for the production of honeycomb sandwich panels.
Due to the use of flax fiber fabric composite material as the skin, the sandwich panel has higher stiffness. At the same time, since it is a thermoplastic composite, the sandwich panel can be easily molded by a rapid molding process.
In order to obtain a relatively balanced product performance, the sandwich panel adopts a prepreg with a thickness of 0.5-1 mm. At the same time, Flaxco has achieved higher stiffness performance by continuously optimizing the production process of the new sandwich panel. The table below presents the flexural property data for the flax fibre skinned sandwich panels.
Compared with glass fiber and carbon fiber, in addition to being 100% recyclable, natural fiber can also effectively reduce carbon emissions, which makes Flaxco composite materials applicable in many fields that require high dimensional stability. Among them, it also includes automobiles and even sports and leisure fields.
Dr. Jochen Pflug, CEO of EconCore, said that Flaxco's natural flax reinforced polypropylene composite material can be very smoothly combined with the polypropylene honeycomb core material, and only two thin layers of surface material are required to obtain ideal mechanical properties.