Feather waste conversion into advanced functional materials
AEROPOWDER is a project aiming to utilize poultry feather waste to develop and manufacture a range of sustainable, low cost and high performance additive materials.
Chicken feathers possess a wide range of highly attractive properties, including a strong lightweight structure, thermal insulation and hydrophobic properties. While these are properties are attractive from a materials design perspective, the poultry industry currently considers the feathers that are removed from chickens as a low value waste product.
Our project aims to take the waste feathers from the poultry industry and process them into into additive materials that capture the advantageous properties of feathers and allow for the subsequent creation of high performance bio-composites. Major advantages of AEROPOWDER will be that by utilizing a waste product the raw material costs will be kept low, the manufacturing process will be kept cost efficient and as a sustainable material that is also biodegradable, AEROPOWDER composites will be more environmentally friendly than composites containing synthetic materials.