🇪🇺 Europe is stepping up efforts to keep end-of-life wind turbine blades out of landfills, as the EU-funded ReWind project develops new routes for reuse and recycling of composite materials.

The project brings together 14 partners from seven countries, including the German Institutes of Textile and Fiber Research (DITF), to develop technologies for dismantling, processing and repurposing wind turbine blades.

The REWIND consortium includes:

🇪🇸 AIMPLAS · Technological Institute of Plastics

🇪🇸 Tekniker

🇫🇷 IPC Centre Technique Industriel de la Plasturgie et des Composites

🇩🇰 Miljøskærm

🇩🇪 Hochschule Pforzheim

🇩🇪 German Institutes of Textile and Fiber Research

🇮🇹 Alke Srl

🇬🇷 National Technical University of Athens

🇫🇷 Suez RV Ile De France SITA IDF

🇪🇸 bCircular GmbH

🇪🇸 Composite Patch

🇹🇷 TPI Composites, Inc.

🇮🇹 PNO Innovation Italia

🇪🇸 AEMAC - Asociación Española de Materiales Compuestos

🧪 One of the project’s key results is a predictive model capable of estimating the mechanical behaviour of recovered materials with more than 90% accuracy, helping assess their use in demanding applications such as automotive components and insulation.

At DITF, researchers are turning recovered glass and carbon fibres into yarns and textile reinforcements for new composite components and wind turbine repair applications.

The team has developed yarn containing around 40% recycled glass fibre (rGF) and polyamide-6, suitable for thermoplastic composites, as well as yarn made from 98% recycled glass fibre. The latter has been used to produce unidirectional (UD) fabrics designed to align fibres with mechanical loads.

A second approach focuses on longitudinal fibre debonding (LFD) tapes recovered directly from wind turbine blades. Researchers are assessing their potential for producing high-performance UD reinforcements from recycled glass-fibre-reinforced plastics.

♻️ The REWIND project aims to provide alternatives to landfill and incineration while keeping composite materials in circulation for new applications.

Source: DITF / European Commission – CORDIS

Image credit: unsplash