Engineers at the Canadian McGill University and Ryerson University have managed to turn environmentally-damaging wind turbine waste into a robust new PLA 3D printing material. Using a mixture of mechanical grinding and pyrolysis, the team have been able to recycle a now-defunct wind turbine blade into a fine fiber powder. During summary testing, the blade’s remnants not only showed higher strength and stiffness than virgin fiberglass, but once integrated with PLA, they proved capable of yielding robust fiber-reinforced 3D printed parts.
“We propose a procedure to incorporate recycled glass fibers from end-of-life wind turbine blades into pure thermoplastic FDM materials,” said the team in their paper. “Our recycling system is expected to reuse a huge amount of turbine blade waste, leading to a major reduction in the landfill of dangerous and harmful blade materials.”
Generally, the high strength and stiffness-to-weight ratio of composites makes them ideal for producing low-carbon footprint aerospace, military and automotive parts. This is also the case within the wind energy sector, where glass fiber is often deployed to reinforce composite-based turbine blades, which turn natural wind-generated kinetic energy into an eco-friendly source of electrical power.
To read the full story, visit https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/engineers-recycle-wind-turbine-waste-into-tough-new-fiber-reinforced-pla-191831/.
Author: Paul Hanaphy, 3D Printing Industry
Image: Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash