EVENT REVIEW | COMPOSITES
Denmark, last year. Stecher said these first six blades will be installed in 2022. Industrialisation work will continue this year and a resin factory is set to be built to support full commercialisation which is expected to be possible from 2024. First deployment will be with energy customer
Above: Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy says the first six Recyclable- Blades will be installed in 2022 at an offshore wind power plant in Germany
Right: Cutting and regrinding of wind turbine blades
among its partners, with National Composites Centre leading the project. SusWind is set to demonstrate viable technologies for recycling the existing stock of wind turbine blades and reuse the materials in second-life applications such as composite parts in electric vehicles, bridges and thermal insulation. It is also looking at alternatives to thermosets, such as bio-derived feedstock and thermoplastics, in developing composites for turbine blades. Design for disassembly is another work area in the project. Vestas is heading another Danish project called CETEC (Circular Economy for Thermosets Epoxy Composites) which also involves epoxy resin producer Olin, the Danish Technological Institute and Aarhus University. Using a process developed by the same partners in the DreamWind project, the first stage involves thermoset composites being disassembled into fibre and epoxy. Then, using a chemical recycling process, the epoxy is further broken up into base components similar to virgin materials which can then be reintroduced into the manufacturing of new turbine blades. In his presentation, Nielsen at Vestas said the epoxy being developed in CETEC is intended to be a drop-in solution. The partners are looking at scaling of the process for production purposes. Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy is another wind turbine manufacturer that has given itself the task of making its products more sustain- able. It is also a partner in the DecomBlades recycling project in Denmark. The company has set targets to have fully recyclable blades by 2030 and fully recyclable turbines by 2040, said Harald Stecher, Materials Engineer, at the AMI conference. Siemens Gamesa has developed RecyclableBlade which uses an epoxy that can be separated from fibres at end-of-life for recovery and recycling. The first six 81m long RecyclableBlades were produced at the Siemens Gamesa blade factory in Aalborg,
16 PLASTICS RECYCLING WORLD | March/April 2022
RWE at its Kaskasi offshore wind power plant in Germany. Siemens Gamesa says it is also working with EDF Renewables and WPD Offshore with the aim to install several sets of RecyclableBlade at future offshore wind energy projects. The company says on its website it has worked in close partnership with Aditya Birla Advanced Materials over the past five years in the develop- ment of a new resin system for RecyclableBlade. The recyclable epoxy resin system is based on Aditya Birla’s proprietary Recyclamine technology. The blade is produced the same way as a standard blade and is based on Siemens Gamesa’s Integral- Blade manufacturing process, which means that there is no increased implementation risk associ- ated with the new resin system, it says. The resin used for the RecyclableBlade has been fully validated, said Stecher in his presentation. Using the recyclable resin results in a 28% reduction in lifetime CO2-equivalent emissions for the blade in comparison with a conventional epoxy resin. The Recyclamine technology was presented at
the AMI conference by Andreas Palinsky, Head of R&D Composites and Electrical at CTP Advanced Materials, which is part of Aditya Birla. Recyclamine is a patented technology which uses novel polyam- ine curing agents to make epoxy thermosets recyclable. He said that making the material this way means “at end-of-life, it can be decomposed in a very simple and controllable way”. Palinsky said CTP has developed a recyclable foam on a lab scale. Fibre-reinforced sandwich panels with Recyclamine epoxy were recycled in
www.plasticsrecyclingworld.com
IMAGE: SGRE
IMAGE: ARKEMA
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