Posters

Abstract

The wind energy sector has undergone tremendous development in four decades. Wind turbine service life is typically 20-25 years. In the coming years, a considerable number of wind turbines are reaching their end-of-life. Hence, the management of composite wind turbine blades (WTBs) at their end-of-life is becoming a challenge. In 2030, 350000 tonnes WTBs will reach their end-of-life. WTBs are resistant to sunlight, moisture, and heat and will take hundreds of years to degrade when landfilled. The organic polymer and balsa wood could release methane or volatile organic compounds. So far, WTBs have mainly ended up in a landfill but the EU, issued directives to minimize waste and increase recycling/material recovery. Recycling technologies for WTBs are not yet widely available, cost-competitive, and commercialized. Three technologies are deemed scalable and mature to be considered as solutions i.e., mechanical shredding, cement co-processing, and pyrolysis. This executive research is a consortium of ten industry and academia partners that aims to design and assess sustainable pathways for the entire value chain of full-scale solutions, including operations and logistics. the blade manufacturers provide blade specification data and the recycling partners examine the EoL processes. The resulting data are compiled and analyzed by academia (our team at SDU). Pyro-outputs (fiber, oil, and gas) processing to final products was challenging due to lower TRL. This led to the development of what-if scenarios for pyro-output processing within a time frame by the time takes to get mature. MFA (quantitative tracking of the distribution of materials among the processes). LCA (assessments of the environmental impacts of scenarios) TEA is also considered for economic analysis. MCDM technic is supposed to evaluate the scenarios based on the results of MFA, LCA, and TEA along with these criteria: TRL, circularity, and time to answer the WTB EoL challenge. https://decomblades.dk [https://decomblades.dk/]