Recycling of fiberglass wind turbine blades into reinforced filaments for use in Additive Manufacturing

By Amirmohammad Rahimizadeh, Jordan Kalman, Kazem Fayazbakhsh, L. Lessard. Composites Part B: Engineering, 2019

136 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The wind energy industry is one of the fastest-growing application sectors of composites, where reinforcement fibers are used in the manufacturing of light rotor blades. Considering the limited lifetime of turbine blades, a growing number of wind turbines will start to be decommissioned. Turbine blades are generally landfilled at their end-of-life, which highly impacts the environment. This paper proposes a systematic scheme combining mechanical recycling and 3D printing to recycle the valuable constituents of the scrap blades and reuse them in a Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) process with the aim of improving the mechanical performance of 3D printed components. Mechanical grinding integrated with a double sieving mechanism is utilized to recover the reinforcement fibers. Tensile test specimens with 5 wt% fiber content are fabricated from the recycled fibers and plastic pellets and their mechanical properties as well as internal microstructure are investigated. The results demonstrate an improvement of 16% and 10% in the elastic modulus and ultimate strength of the reinforced composite filament as compared to the commercially available pure PLA filament. As well, a Young's modulus of 3.35 GPa was observed for the FFF fabricated samples, which is an 8% increase relative to pure PLA samples.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Building and Construction, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b1f308444f0f474c1a6de9611a790785e3f5f6a3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Automotive Engineering

1. F. A. C. Sanchez
2. Hakim Boudaoud
3. Mauricio Camargo
4. Joshua M. Pearce

In Mechanical Engineering

1. Joshua M. Pearce
2. S. Zhong

Citations in the corpus

• Plastic recycling in additive manufacturing: A systematic literature review and opportunities for the circular economy (2020, background): “In the same way, the work developed by (Rahimizadeh et al., 2019) proved the feasibility of using recycled glass fibers from wind turbine blades with comparable mechanical properties to virgin filament.”