Old wind turbine blades turned into treasure! New technology makes recycling problems easier
Recently, a multinational environmental protection project has made significant progress. Scientists have successfully solved the century-old problem of recycling old wind turbine blades - they can not only extract key materials from discarded blades, but also reprocess the recycled glass fiber into high-quality raw materials to make new blades!
This project, called DecomBlades, recently received good news: Siemens Gamesa, a world-renowned wind power company, has received the first batch of 40 tons of new materials made of recycled fibers, and is building 115-meter-long giant blades for Orsted Energy's wind power project. This marks a key step for the wind power industry towards "resource recycling".
For a long time, how to deal with tens of thousands of tons of retired wind turbine blades has been a headache for environmentalists. These blades are made of glass fiber and resin composite materials, stacked like a thousand-layer cake, which can neither be easily disassembled nor decomposed. In the past, they could only be landfilled or incinerated, which wasted resources and polluted the environment.
Now, a team composed of multiple companies and research institutions has found a new method: first use a special process to completely separate the glass fiber in the old blades, and after high-temperature melting treatment, they can actually obtain recycled fibers with quality comparable to new materials. What is even more surprising is that these recycled materials have been verified in actual production - the fiber cloth woven from them fully meets the requirements for manufacturing ultra-long offshore wind turbine blades.
The project leader excitedly said that more than half of the weight of the blade is glass fiber. Now every time an old blade is recycled, it is equivalent to saving the raw materials for making half a new blade.
The engineers involved in the project shared a vivid case: the fiber cloth they made from recycled materials fully met the flatness and strength standards and was successfully applied to large offshore wind turbine blades. "Watching these 'waste' turn into top-grade materials is like witnessing magic!" The on-site staff exclaimed.
Environmental experts pointed out that this breakthrough will not only allow the wind power industry to get rid of the doubts of "pseudo-environmental protection", but is also expected to reduce the landfill volume of blades by more than 90%. In the next step, the research team will focus on how to reduce costs so that this "green magic" can be promoted and applied globally.