BRILLIANT aims to achieve weight reduction, exploiting carbon negative reinforcements for composites, in particular validating the possibility to employ natural fibres (such as flax, hemp, bamboo) in association with recyclable resins. Current applications of such fibres are usually limited to indoor applications (mainly components for automotive internals) due to limited stability in presence of humidity, especially upon pre-damaging.

Nanotechnologies and surface finishing can disruptively help to solve this problem, efficiently and environmentally friendly. BRILLIANT will develop the engineering of fully biobased composites (that is also employing biobased resins) along with studying recyclable resins, such as cleavable PMMA. PET derived reactive thermoplastics developed by Crossfire will be one of the resins of choice, due to their fast curing
process, full compatibility with natural fibres and high efficiency in protecting them from humidity, due to high adhesion with hydroxyls present in natural fibres and peculiarly low viscosity that is typical of
their formulations.

For even better protection (marine and off shore applications) a surface Al layer is of fundamental importance for guaranteeing longer operations and lower maintenance costs.