Development of the Chemical Recycling Technology of Glass Fiber Reinforced PA6 Parts

Recently, the plastic material is positively introducing for automotive parts due to the Needs of vehicle weight reduction and cost saving. On the other hand, the countermeasure for scrapped car is a big subject to need to consider as a car maker. Therefore, the development of recycling technology for plastic parts has been necessary. In this study, we tried to develop recycling technology for glass fiber reinforced Polyamide6(PA6) which is applied to various automotive parts like an air intake manifold. As a recycling technique, we focused on the chemical recycling which can reclaim raw material of PA6(ε- caprolactams) from the post-consumer automotive parts. The chemical recycling we selected can be put on a higher priority because it has possibility to utilize the limited resource repeatedly. As a result, we could retain high purity of ε- caprolactams using our following two techniques which make possible to recycle Polyamide 6 materials. One is to separate PA6 from glass fiber. To optimize pressure is important after decreasing the resin viscosity with optimized organic acid. Another is to depolymerize PA6 continuously using phosphoric acid which separated the glass fiber. Recycled PA6 which we synthesized from using ε- caprolactams from the above method showed same level of physical property as original PA6.