This research project will help make the wind industry more sustainable by developing recyclable wind turbine blades using vitrimer composites.
There is a significant amount of waste generation expected due to the possible decommissioning of thousands of wind turbines nearing their end of life in Europe in the coming years.
Despite efforts to maximise the amount of these blades being recycled, a large proportion of the first-generation wind turbine blades are disposed of either in landfills or by incineration.
This means there is a need to develop wind turbine blades that have longer service lives and more sustainable end-of-life scenarios.
The project
EOLIAN aims to develop wind blades with a longer lifetime, better maintainability and reliability, and improved sustainability and recyclability.
To achieve these goals, EOLIAN proposes bio-based repairable and recyclable wind turbine blades consisting of vitrimer composites and basalt fibres.
Selection of vitrimers with properties and chemistry suitable for the application will be performed.
The process of vitrimer selection and characterisation, and fabrication of the vitrimer composites will be parallelly assisted at every step by developing a multi-scale model ranging from the molecular scale up to actual sample scales.
The integration of recyclable sensors and heating actuators within the blades during manufacturing will increase their functionality and maintainability.
Once the vitrimer composites are fabricated, recovery of their original constituents will be demonstrated by chemical and mechanical recycling techniques.
The development of 2nd generation composites using the recovered materials will be undertaken next.
Research impact
Overall, this project, through the development of recyclable wind turbine blades using vitrimer composites, will solve the long-standing issue of disposal of wind turbine blades after their service lifetime and help in making the wind industry more sustainable and environmentally friendly.
EOLIAN will help usher in a new generation of wind turbine blades which are superior to existing blades in recyclability and repairability.
This will provide superior environmental, economic and social benefits compared to current solutions.
The integration of sensors and actuators within the blades will benefit wind turbine operators to monitor the blades regularly and diagnose issues before they become critical.
The environmental advantages of recyclable blades will help create a circular economy.
Our collaborative partners
Meet the Principal Investigator(s) for the project
Daniel Paul - Daniel is a Research Fellow at Brunel Composites Centre (BCC) and joined the group in December 2023. He is actively involved in idea generation, leading and assisting projects, publication of papers and other dissemination activities.Before joining BCC, Daniel has worked primarily on composite testing and modelling with research experience in impact and crashworthiness analysis. He has also worked on repair of composite wind turbine blades and was involved in computational modelling of the composite cure process and post-repair residual stress estimation.
Dr Nithin Jayasree - Nithin is a Team Leader at the Brunel Composites Centre (BCC). He is currently leading the composite modelling and testing team at BCC and his work includes multiscale modelling of materials including composites, CFD, materials research, and composite processing including thermoset infusion & RTM. He is working in multiple Innovate UK, Horizon 2020 and Cleansky projects.
He completed his PhD at the Politechnico di Torino, Italy in 2017 on process simulations of thermoplastic composite materials.
Related Research Group(s)
Brunel Composites Centre - Shared research and technology capabilities, specialising in novel composites processing and joining technologies applied to industrial environments.
Partnering with confidence
Organisations interested in our research can partner with us with confidence backed by an external and independent benchmark: The Knowledge Exchange Framework. Read more.
Project last modified 29/08/2024