FLOEME Project

Eco-design and circular economy have become key drivers of innovation and important issues to develop future eco-responsible factories. At the European scale, hemp and flax are the most widely used and pertinent plant fibres as composite materials reinforcement. The FLOEME project proposes an integrative approach to investigate the nature, the origin and the impact of defects, mechanically generated in flax fibres along the whole production chain. One of the main originalities and contributions of FLOEME is to investigate the same batch of fibres from the plant to the 3D printed part. A strong academic partner network gathered brings together all the needed expertise and techniques for fibre extraction (scutching and hackling), reinforcement manufacturing (yarns), defects analyses and composite characterization. This academic consortium is advantageously supplemented by one of the French industrial leaders in flax scutching, Van Robaeys Frères (VRF, Killem, 59, Fr), which offers the possibility to have access to the most recent varieties and optimal flax growing conditions; VRF guarantees also the availability and traceability of an industrial batch of flax, all along the project. Scientific results of FLOEME will be shared and co-develop with VRF, especially to help the company in understanding the impact of its scutching process and in implementing optimised industrial scutching parameters to reduce the impact on flax fibres ultrastructure and increase their performances. In this context, the four main scientific objectives of FLOEME are the following: ● Understand which process steps of the processing chain generate the most defects. ● Optimise the fibre extraction and transformation processes to minimise these defects and obtain the highest quality yarns as possible. ● Produce long-fibre 3D printed load bearing composite parts from the optimised yarns.