Rubisco approached Gurit to help develop a composite sandwich panel using natural fibers, aiming to combine the practical advantages of composites with improved environmental performance for non-structural use cases.
The result is a panel that brings together recycled and bio-based materials with natural fiber reinforcement. Three material technologies sit at its heart: Gurit’s PET recycled structural foam core, Gurit’s AMPRO BIO epoxy resin and Rubisco’s BioTEX hemp fabric. Used together, they form a lightweight structural panel that is made with up-to 100% recycled or bio-based material content depending on the configuration. The resulting panel can also be tailored to individual needs and material requirements, with changes to thickness, reinforcement architecture and dimensions all being fully adjustable.
Rubisco is a New Zealand-based materials company with a clear focus to build naturally through the use of natural fibers like hemp and wool, turning them into high-performance materials. One of Rubisco’s key offerings is their BioTEX fabric – the material chosen for this project with Gurit. BioTEX is a natural fiber reinforcement fabric made specifically for composite manufacturing.
The Gurit x Rubisco panel is built around the simple principle of a composite sandwich structure. For this particular panel, the outer skins are made from BioTEX hemp fabric which is laminated with AMPRO BIO epoxy resin, while the core is Gurit’s recycled PET structural foam.
The resin system used in the Gurit x Rubisco panel is called AMPRO BIO, one of Gurit’s bio-based epoxy resin systems.
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