Sporting good industry and beyond
Pickleball racket made of recycled carbon fibers
HEAD Sport GmbH
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HEAD used rCFs from solvolysis and/or High Voltage Fragmentation to produce parts of rackets with a flat surface like a pickle-ball racket in the form of sheet molded compounds.
The origin of the recycled carbon fibers have been used tennis rackets. Both standard impregnating resins as well as newly developed biobased and smart resins have been used and benchmarked through different demonstrators.
The demonstrators have been tested according to the relevant standards and sporting conditions with the target KPIs:
processability in standard lines, fatigue cycle of 10.000 ball impacts.
- Tennis rackets, due to their requirements and shape are built from ~100% UD carbon fiber prepregs.
- Due to a flat hitting surface, Paddel and Pickleball are produced with a different technology and have different mechanical specifications.
- Recycled fibers, from Tennis rackets or other sources can be processed in a kind of SMC/BMC process and can fulfill the KPI.
Challenges
- Quality of recycling fibers for new process.
- Isotropic properties especially at thin layers.
Solution
- SMC/BMC Process adaption.
Contacts
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