Since January 2013 CIDAUT has been working on the NEMESIS project, entitled «New Trends and Market Survey for the End of Life of Aircrafts. Eco Design Guideline. CIDAUT has led the consortium working with three other partners (University of Valladolid, ITRB Ltd and PBLH International Consulting), all under the supervision of Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology.
With all this data an automatic decision tree was implemented, and two different conditions were analyzed: the cheapest process or the best quality. Afterwards, a complete application example was carried out as a case study for demonstration purposes. On this regard the Belly Fairing for an Airbus plane was chosen and the computer application was developed in MS Excel. Therefore this application can easily be used for any other component of the aircraft in the future.
Finally an economic sustainability study was conducted, where several estimates of the future of recycled materials were performed. These estimates were compared with those of the experts (obtained via the Market Survey) and the recycling methodologies previously calculated from an economic viewpoint were analyzed. This allowed a complete validation of the developed methodology.
The project finished last June and the results have met all the expectations, showing mainly the evolution of materials and, therefore, the future of aircraft recycling.
Thanks to this project, and others working in the same direction, aircraft recycling will become a reality in the future. Perhaps, in a few years it will be possible to adapt aeronautical regulations in a similar way to those existing for the automotive industry.