|
|
|
We are excited to share with you the seventh newsletter of the r-LightBioCom project, which proposes a paradigm shift in the way high-performance composites (HPC) are manufactured and recycled, unlocking sustainable-by-design production of lightweight HPC.
In this issue, you will be able to find out about: |
|
|
- events that the project and our partners have participated in, alongside our newest research activities, success stories, articles, and more
- an outlook on the project’s future, with the relevance and impact of the project's results
- general updates on the project progress since the previous newsletter, and one last sign-off!
|
|
|
We hope that you will enjoy reading this newsletter!
|
|
|
HSKL - Open Campus day 2026
On April 17th 2026, project partner Hoschschule Kaiserslautern (HSKL) hosted their annual Open-campus Day in Campus Pirmasens, Kaiserslautern, Germany, where the r-LightBioCom project was presented to the students and researchers, as the project is a successful example of the strong research culture at the university, as well as a practice-oriented, innovative, and sustainable project.
|
|
|
22nd European Conference on Composite Materials (ECCM22)
From June 22nd - June 25th 2026, the r-LightBioCom project, alongside many other EcoComposites Cluster partners all attended and presented a variety of oral presentations at the ECCM22 conference in Oslo, Norway.
From r-LightBioCom specifically, project partners Coventry University (CU) had an oral presentation titled "A multidisciplinary optimisation framework for fibre-reinforced composite materials", while Leibniz-Institut für Verbundwerkstoffe (IVW) also presented "Comparative Study of Bio-Based and Conventional Epoxy Resins in Unidirectional Filament-Wound Coupons for Sustainable Hydrogen Storage Applications".
|
|
|
M2D2026: 11th International Conference on Mechanics and Materials in Design 2026
From June 22nd - June 26th 2026, project partner DLR attended and presented their latest scientific publication and datasets in detail to the international scientific community at the M2D2026 conference in Abulfeira, Portugal. Both of the aforementioned publications are covered later on in this newsletter, and are available to access directly from here.
|
|
|
|
|
2nd Project Success Article
At the closing stages of the project, r-LightBioCom has achieved a great milestone by developing and demonstrating novel fast-curing technologies that not only significantly reduce energy consumption and shorten production cycles, but also enable the integration of bio-based materials in advanced, high-performance composite manufacturing. This significant achievement in developing the innovative Ultra-Violet (UV) enhanced Resin Transfer Moulding (RTM) and Microwave-assisted vacuum infusion opens up new pathways to produce low-carbon composite materials for a range of demanding industrial applications.
Read the full article here!
|
|
|
|
3rd Project Success Article
Through the development of a lightweight rear spoiler and a bio-based honeycomb trunk floor panel being finalised, the r-LightBioCom project has translated its research on sustainable composite materials into tangible demonstrators with clear industrial relevance. The project has successfully demonstrated two automotive components that showcase exactly how sustainable materials can be integrated into high-performance vehicle applications without compromising functionality or manufacturability; these demonstrators being a rear wing/spoiler for competition-grade race cars, and a honeycomb-based trunk floor. Both were fabricated with advanced composite materials by combining recycled carbon fibres, natural fibres, and bio-based polymers with optimised manufacturing processes.
Read the full article here!
|
|
|
|
On April 15th and 16th 2026, r-LightBioCom partners met together for one last project meeting in-person at AITEX headquarters in Alcoy, Spain to cover the final steps of the project. This meeting marked the final phase of r-LightBioCom; bringing international partners from across the consortium to the project coordinator's headquarters.
|
|
|
|
The meeting provided valuable opportunities to reflect on our research progress, with demonstrators and samples brought to display from various partners, exchange collaborative insights, and to align the final steps for the project across all topics and work packages. All of our project partners made this gathering productive by engaging in detailed discussions, creating and presenting informative presentations across all topics, and by also exploring the different ways that r-LightBioCom's results could be maximised after the project's end.
Overall, this meeting was an undeniable success, and exactly served its purpose as the planning meeting in order to organise the final steps for the r-LightBioCom project, and its impact going forward after the end of the project. The success of not only this meeting, but also the entire project would not have been possible without the skilled collaboration, teamwork, and commitment of all project partners.
|
|
European Commission Final Review Meeting |
|
|
|
The final project review meeting with the European Commission took place online on June 25th 2026, and turned out to be a great success thanks to the skilled cooperation of our project partners.
The review covered all parts of the project, including the development of bio-based resins and components, the Coupled Ecological Optimisation (CEO) framework, and the development of circular composite material routes, alongside any questions from the reviewers as well.
The following are what caught the eyes of the project reviewers the most:
|
|
|
Bio-based resins
The reviewers were overall very pleased and with the project's success in all forms, but were notably the most impressed by the research of our bio-based resins, where very high bio-based contents up to 60% were reached, and averaged around 50% across the different resin formulations from various partners. Some cases of incredibly high glass transition temperatures were additionally reached, exceeding 200°C. This particular aspect is especially relevant for usage in the aeronautical sector, which greatly expands the possible use-cases across all relevant sectors for the bio-based resins.
CEO framework and DEC activities
It was also highlighted by the reviewers that the CEO framework and its development peaked their interest, as they found it to be an extremely interesting technical topic of the project. The reviewers also found that the project's dissemination, communication, and exploitation (DEC) activities were undeniably engaging, easy to follow, and targeted wide technical and non-technical audiences. They were especially pleased that the effectiveness of our DEC activities led to foster strong collaborations across various communities, such as the creation of the EcoComposites Cluster, joining and cooperating with the ECOSYSTEX community, and even being reached out to by the well-known JEC Composites Magazine to collaborate and create four different articles. These highly positive reactions to the project's research and tactical DEC campaign show the clear success of the consortium's work, and validate all of the organisation and effort invested into these topics.
Publications and Use-cases
The meeting included reviews of our publications, datasets, and also the use-cases for the automotive, infrastructure, and aerospace sectors. All publications will remain available on their respective websites, and also the r-LightBioCom website. The datasets were published by project partner DLR on the Zenodo open-science publishing website, and have received positive feedback from our reviewers. This is not only because there are so many materials available to access, but also due to the public dissemination of various cores for quasi-static and dynamic loading of materials are publicly available through open-access publishing, as well as our partners' respective scientific publications. The automotive use-case, specifically the bio-based trunk floor demonstrator received very positive attention due to its impressive bio-based properties that also reach the necessary automotive standards and requirements.
Conclusion
Overall, the project was well received by the European Commission reviewers. In particular, the project was considered highly significant, technically interesting, and positive for the current and future development of sustainable HPCs, and they also kindly congratulated us for our excellent results. We would like to thank our reviewers for their engagement and understanding in the project's review, and we are also extremely grateful and proud of our consortium's positive and well-managed efforts that went into achieving these impressive further steps in research and development of sustainable HPCs. |
|
|
Evaluation of sandwich core materials for combined material and ecological performance
R. Sturm (1); A. Harrison (1); T. Wirtz (1); June 2026
(1) Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e. V. (DLR), Pfaffenwaldring 38-40, 70569, Stuttgart-Vaihingen, Germany
In: International Journal of Mechanics and Materials in Design.
In engineering applications, sandwich structures are of high value due to their exceptional stiffness-to-weight ratios, strength, and structural efficiency. These benefits are primarily due to the unique combination of strong face sheets and a lightweight core material. The core material in a sandwich structure plays a crucial role in determining the overall mechanical behavior, especially under compressive loads. Studies were performed to analyses the compressive performance of different available core materials, to allow the identification of the optimal core materials for static and dynamic loads. Besides the material performance the ecological footprint and failure behavior of core materials and composite was assessed and compared. The combined consideration allows the selection of the best material based under the combined consideration of lightweight and sustainability. |
|
|
MOSAIC-HFC: Multi-Objective Sustainable And Integrated Cost-effective framework for Hybrid Fibre Composites
F. Cepero-Mejias (1), J. Christensen (1), S. Abubakar (1), A. Pedrosa-Valbuena (2), L. Martin-Gobernado (2), E. Cañibano-Alvarez (2); June 2026
(1) Coventry University, Priory St, Coventry CV1 5FB, United Kingdom
(2) CIDAUT – Fundación para la Investigación y Desarrollo en Transporte y Energía, Pl. Vicente Aleixandre Campos, 2, 47151 Boecillo, Valladolid, Spain
The early-stage design of fibre-reinforced composites requires balancing mechanical performance, manufacturing cost, and environmental impact, which are often addressed sequentially or in isolation. This paper presents MOSAIC-HFC, a unified multi-objective optimisation framework for the sustainable design of hybrid fibre-reinforced composites. The framework formulates material selection as a constrained mixture design problem and integrates cost modelling, life-cycle environmental assessment, and structural performance estimation within a single optimisation workflow. A multi-objective evolutionary algorithm is employed to identify Pareto-optimal solutions that minimise production cost and carbon emissions while satisfying predefined mechanical constraints, followed by a multi-criteria decision analysis to support solution ranking under user-defined preferences. The proposed framework is modular and extendable to multiple composite applications, enabling systematic exploration of trade-offs across different manufacturing processes, fibre architectures, and performance requirements. Its applicability and robustness are demonstrated through four representative use cases from the automotive, aerospace, and infrastructure sectors. The results highlight consistent framework-level trends across applications, illustrating the benefits of a unified optimisation approach for early-stage composite material design. MOSAIC-HFC provides a general decision-support methodology relevant to sustainability-driven structural and multidisciplinary composite optimisation problems.
|
|
|
Quasi-Static and Dynamic Core Material Dataset - Compression
R. Sturm (1); A. Harrison (1); T. Wirtz (1); June 2026
(1) Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e. V. (DLR), Pfaffenwaldring 38-40, 70569, Stuttgart-Vaihingen, Germany
Published on zenodo.org; June 2026.
These datasets have been published in open-access on the Zenodo website. The datasets are of compression tests for various Core Materials, those that are commercially available, and those developed in r-LightBioCom. The datasets have been separated into two downloadable files, separating the Quasi-Static data and Dynamic data.
The Quasi-Static tests were conducted on a Universal Testing Machine, while the dynamic loading was conducted on a pendulum impact machine. The information of the machines used is also included within each respective dataset.
The two datasets are mainly formatted by the following:
- An ‚Overview‘ page detailing information and ‚How-to‘ of each dataset
- The recorded Force of each specimen
- The recorded Displacement (compression) of each specimen
- The meta-data of each test (specimen geometry, test speed, standards etc.)
- Images of each specimen
|
|
|
Project Outcomes, Impact and Future |
|
|
|
Over the course of the project, r-LightBioCom has successfully achieved several major milestones across various development areas that collectively advance the development of sustainable, circular high-performance composite materials, which even have potential for even further developments outside of their particular areas.
|
|
|
Materials
The consortium have successfully developed various different sustainable materials such as our bio-based resins and vitrimer resin systems in order to reduce the amount of mainly petrochemical-based resins, bio-based additives and nano-additives to disperse nanoparticles throughout, and to reinforce the resins. Finally, recyclable and sustainable fibes have been developed as alternatives to conventional fibres, and with the general problems of fibre degredation and recyclability properties in mind.
These are considered by our aforementioned European Commission reviewers to have strong potential for commercial exploitation in the future, especially in applications where a combination of high bio-based content, industrial processability, thermal resistance and circularity are required.
|
|
|
|
Production Technologies
Throughout the project, the consortium have successfully developed various technologies to enhance the production of HPCs. In terms of material processing technologies, these include sustainable prepregs as intermediates, continuous thermo-compression technology to enable the transformation of non-woven textiles into sustainable honeycomb materials, and lastly, replacing conventional materials such as steel and concrete with much more sustainable HPCs. The consortium have also successfully created fast-curing technologies to reduce harmful emissions and energy usage.
These technologies have all been respectively confirmed from the reviewers to have excellent potential for future development, exploitation, and implementation.
|
|
|
|
Methods and Tools
Lastly, the consortium have also reached development milestones for new composite modeling, sustainability, and validation tools. In particular, our Coupled Ecological Optimisation (CEO) framework was developed to greatly advance and enhance composite structure optimisation, alongside a numerical material card calibration process compatible with the mentioned CEO framework. The consortium has additionally researched new chemical recycling processes to enable the reusage of existing composite parts, and performed a full life-cycle assessment (LCA) from the beginning of composite development, directly to the end.The European Commission reviewers found that these developments were particularly fascinating and technically relevant to the advancement of a more sustainable composites industry.
|
|
|
Parts of the r-LightBioCom project will continue to be online to the public after the project ends. This is in order to ensure the long-term visibility and accessibility of the project. The r-LightBioCom project LinkedIn account will remain online and contactable to answer any queries, and all currently available posts will remain accessible and readable by the public. The project website will also remain online, and will serve as a central repository for project information, publications, news articles, previous promotional materials, key results, and all things r-LightBioCom.
The project will also continue to be represented within EcoComposites Cluster activities in order to continuously support our collaboration, networking, and knowledge exchange activities within the sustainable composites community.
|
|
As the EU Project r-LightBioCom comes to a close, we would like to sincerely thank all of our project partners, stakeholders, collaborators, and everyone who has followed and supported us over the past 3.5 years.
Through our collaboration, we have demonstrated that high-performance composites can undoubtedly become more sustainable, circular, and resource-efficient. Although the project has now officially ended since June 30th 2026, the innovative results and advancements developed through r-LightBioCom will continue to inspire future research and development in order to make the composites industry more sustainable.
Thank you for being part of this journey to achieve a more sustainable Europe!
|
|
Follow us on social media, and share the information with your colleagues and friends.
|
|
|
|
Contact: info@r-LightBioCom.eu
|
|
Funded by the European Union under Grant Agreement Project No 101091691. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. The European Union cannot be held responsible.
|
|
|
|
|
Copyright © 2023 r-LightBioCom, All rights reserved.
Imprint |
|
|
|
If you no longer wish to receive the r-LightBioCom newsletter, you can unsubscribe here. |
|
|
|
|
