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

摘要

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.