HELACS Consortium celebrates its M24 general assembly at Aitiip's facilities

In February 2023, HELACS held its M24 general assembly at Aitiip Technology Center’s facilities, the project coordinator. The entire Consortium had the opportunity to meet in Zaragoza and present the project progress achieved by each partner in recent months.

HELACS Consortium

Also, the partners, together with representatives of AIRBUS as topic managers, have designed an action plan for the coming months and discussed in a workshop the possibility of exporting the technological model and recovery of high-value materials developed in HELACS to other strategic sectors, such as construction. It has been two days of networking, conferences, exchange of experiences, knowledge transfer and a visit to Aitiip's

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  • For aircrafts that are no longer in service, the owner considers the trade-off between direct resale and disassemble & recycled. Besides that, HELACS project (Holistic processes for the cost-effective and sustainable management of End of Life of Aircraft Composite Structures) is focused on the study of the second one of these options.

  • AITIIP Technology Centre leads HELACS, a European project which aims to develop a dual methodology of controlled comprehensive dismantling in order to make possible the classification, recycling and reuse of aircraft parts made of thermoset and thermoplastic composites that have reached their end of life. Annually, the aeronautical industry is depositing more than 40,000 tons of end-of-life composite material waste in landfills. Thanks to the recovery of materials, the technology proposed by HELACS will benefit the change towards an energy efficiency model.

  • You can now download the official HELACS project brochure. A project comes to transform the dismantling process of the aircraft of the future. HELACS employs novel robotics to recycle composite materials of large components. The HELACS process is based on the application of high water pressure that will selectively chop the thermoset parts into a dimension suitable for recycling. In addition, the pyrolysis process is used for the carbonization of the thermoset matrix to reuse the carbon fibers that overcome this chemical decomposition.
This project has received funding from the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement Nº 101007871
 Sky 2 UE