Essais & Simulations n°140

DOSSIER
SPÉCIAL JEC WORLD
RESEARCH
IPC wants to accelerate
in the recycling of composite
materials and research
Gilles Dennler, the new Director of Research at IPC, the
industrial technical centre dedicated to plastic and composite
innovation, which took over from Bertrand Fillon last winter,
has taken over the reins of a structure of nearly 130 employees
involved in numerous French and especially European
projects. Among the technical centre's priorities are reducing
production costs and, now at the forefront, recycling composite
materials.
Gilles Dennler
Gilles Dennler holds an engineering degree in materials
physics from Insa Lyon, a Ph.D. in Plasma Physics
from Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse and a Ph.D.
in Engineering Physics from Ecole Polytechnique de
Montréal. In 2003, he joined the University of Linz
(Austria) where he holds a position as assistant professor
in physical chemistry. He was recruited in 2006 by the
start-up Konarka, dedicated to the development and
commercialization of polymer solar cells. There he held the position of Director of
Research (Lowell, MA, USA) and worked closely with Prof. Alan Heeger (UCSB), Nobel
Laureate in Chemistry and founder of the company. In 2011, he will take over the
direction of the Materials Laboratory of the Minoru Institute for Advanced Research
(IMRA, Sophia-Antipolis), which is part of the Toyota group. He joins IPC in 2018 as
Deputy Research Director for Major Programs (circular economy, new energies,
mobility, well-being). Gilles Dennler has published around a hundred scientific
articles and filed around thirty patents.
value-added production, such as "smart
composites" with embedded intelligence
and sensory capture or IoT. "The
factory of the future is to be built and
new products with high added value are
needed to increase the competitiveness of
our industrial branch," explains Gilles
Dennler. IPC's mission is to help plastics
and composites companies meet these
technological challenges and prepare for
the future through innovation.
STRONG INVOLVEMENT IN
RESEARCH PROJECTS
"The transition to a circular economy
has become a national priority".
IPC's new R&D director could not
be clearer. "The place of composites
is part of a context of “plastic bashing”
which is pushing us to move towards
the circular economy. This circularity
of materials has become a very important
issue in recent years because
although composite materials have
intrinsic qualities that enable them to
increase the life of parts, they are nevertheless
very difficult to recycle". The
issue of recycling is felt at the end of a
product's life but also at the production
stage when parts are scrapped. From
a production point of view, the trend
is always towards lower costs; "to this
end, we are carrying out projects to transpose
techniques borrowed from the plastics
industry to the composites industry".
In terms of actual research, in addition
to the growing theme of the circular
economy, the CTI is also focusing
on the industry of the future and high
Deployed on seven sites (Levallois, the
head office, IPC Alençon, IPC Chambéry,
IPC Clermont, IPC Laval, IPC
Oyonnax and IPC Sainte-Sigolène), the
IPC teams spread throughout France are
heavily involved in French and, above
all, European projects, with no less than
eighteen in total committed to the Old
Continent (i.e. nearly three-quarters of
the total number of projects carried out
each year). Among them is Hyprod, a
project on the development of highspeed
production means for smart
composites. "As part of this project, we
44 IESSAIS & SIMULATIONS • N°140 • février - mars 2020