The recycled product has exactly the same material qualities as the virgin resin and can be re-used to produce new blades.
The Zebra Consortium brings together six partners including ENGIE in order to develop and test two alternative blades manufactured using the thermoplastic Elium® resin, which offers the same mechanical performance - light weight and resistance - as the thermosetting materials used in current blades. With the additional advantage that it can be recycled using different recycling routes.
The first 62-m prototype blade with glass fibres was produced at the beginning of 2022 and is currently being subjected to mechanical performance testing. In December 2023, the Zebra consortium unveiled a second recyclable wind turbine blade. This 77 m long blade features a new Carbon-Elium® resin spar cap technology and a new adhesive recyclable together with the Elium® resin.
This innovation constitutes an important step forward towards the circularity of the wind industry.
Meanwhile, good progress is being made in developing and testing the processes for recycling the waste produced during production as well as the waste at the blade’s end of life. The processes being explored involve thermal depolymerisation as an essential step to ensuring that 100% of the waste can be recycled and that Elium® resin can be converted into its original building blocks, the monomers.
Expert Frederic Monnaie confirms the benefits: “This means that the recycled product has exactly the same material qualities as the virgin resin and can be re-used to produce new blades.”
The Zebra project is now at cruising speed. The consortium has made good progress defining and testing processes for recycling production-related and end-of-life waste as well as with the related life-cycle analysis.
Full-scale structural testing of the second Zebra blade has begun, while the first Zebra blade has been successfully validated. A complete life cycle analysis is carried out by ENGIE Laborelec and ENGIE Lab Crigen to compare the environmental impact of Zebra blades and conventional thermoset blades and is expected by the end of June 2024.
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