A Few More Tidbits in Composites Sustainability News
- Ned Patton
- 35 minutes ago
- 5 min read
I received my November Issue of the Composites World magazine (electronically of course) this week and as usual it had a couple of interesting developments in the world of composite materials sustainability, one of which is sort of fun – if you like water sports. So, I thought I would write about these and a couple of other things that I came across in my information feed about composites.
There is a startup in India that has taken on the challenge of creating something useful from end of life glass fiber wind turbine blades. They are repurposing them to make small transportable watercraft that the user can assemble in very little time and go have fun on the water. They are even targeting larger watercraft as well as floating docks and jetties made from used wind turbine blades. The lead pic in this post is one of their newest creations, a portable, easy to assemble catamaran pontoon boat where the pontoons are used wind turbine blades. They take a chunk of a blade that is long enough, cap the ends with caps that make them look more like a pontoon on the ends, and attach them together with some other pieces and parts from used wind turbine blades. A pic of their process and how they put these things together is below.
They have obviously figured out how to use the entire blade of a small wind turbine to make one of these catamaran style pontoon boats. They even had a pic of one of their people actually doing all of the carpentry work on a wind turbine blade to make one of the pontoons.
This company, headquartered in Mumbai, India, started their business to try to make water transport more of a sustainable business. Initially they focused on using bamboo to make canoes because bamboo is such a fast growing plane and it has wonderful structural properties because all of the long fibers go pretty much in the long direction of the bamboo stalk. Being a member of the grass family, bamboo grows faster than nearly any other plant, and has been used by people in bamboo growing regions as structural material for centuries. They very quickly realized the potential of used wind turbine blades as free material that they could divert from landfills and turn into useful products for the maritime industry.
In another article in the latest Composites World, Verretex (Lausanne, Switzerland) has teamed up with a Spanish company, Ryse Energy, to demonstrate the use of 100% recycled glass fiber to make new small wind turbine blades. Ryse Energy is a global manufacturer and supplier of small wind turbines for small off-grid installations. They manufacture and supply small wind turbines and sell solar systems for small industrial, farm, and even residential installations where it is less expensive to install an off grid system than it is to run a line from the grid and connect. This is a growing model in the less developed parts of the world, and this company has just demonstrated the use of recycled glass fiber from end of life wind turbine blades, boat hulls, and even production scrap. This is similar to the recycled carbon fiber market that I have talked about in the past, and it is a burgeoning market.
The Verretex recycled glass fiber is sold as a non-woven fabric material that has equivalent mechanical properties to virgin non-woven glass fabrics, which made it fairly simple for Ryse Energy to use their established fabrication procedures to basically treat this recycled fabric just like virgin glass fabric. They achieved results that match the virgin glass fiber product well enough that they met the IEC 61400-2 safety and durability standard. So, this was a very good example of a drop in replacement for virgin fabric using recycled fibers.
And in a final example of the use of recycled fiber, Toray has successfully developed and demonstrated a lower temperature carbon fiber composite pyrolysis or thermolysis process that is able to retain over 95% of the mechanical strength of virgin carbon fiber. This process appears at least to me to be very similar if not identical to the process that used by Composite Recycling and a couple of others to recycle glass and carbon fiber composites both. The real news here is that Toray is the largest manufacturer and supplier of carbon fiber in the world, so having them on board with a process that will take apart end of life composites and produce production ready carbon fiber means that recycling of carbon fiber has completely arrived and has become the way of the future for this business.
That’s about it for this week’s post. As always, I hope everyone that reads these posts enjoys them as much as I enjoy writing them. And I hope people who are interested find something they can use in their lives or at least some ideas that they might be able to put into practice. At least I hope that these make people think a bit about sustainability and some of the major issues looming before us.
I will post this first on my website – www.nedpatton.com – and then on LinkedIn. And if anyone wants to provide comments to this, I welcome them with open arms. Comments, criticisms, etc. are all quite welcome. I really do want to engage in a conversation with all of you about composites because we can learn so much from each other as long as we share our own perspectives. And that is especially true of the companies and research institutions that I mention in these posts. The more we communicate the message the better we will be able to effect the changes in the industry that are needed.
My second book, which will be out sometime next year, is a roadmap to a circular and sustainable business model for the industry which I hope that at least at some level the industry will follow. Only time will tell. At least McFarland announced it in their Fall Catalog. And this time it is under a bit different category – Science and Technology. Maybe it will get noticed – as always that is just a crap shoot.
As I have said before, my publisher and my daughter have come to an agreement about the cover. So, I’ve included the approved cover at the end of this post. Let me know whether or not you like the cover. Hopefully people will like it enough and will be interested enough in composites sustainability that they will buy it. And of course I hope that they read it and get engaged. We need all the help we can get.
Last but not least, I still need to plug my first book. “The String and Glue of our World” pretty much covers the watershed in composites, starting with a brief history of composites, then introducing the Periodic Table and why Carbon is such an important and interesting element. The book was published and made available August of 2023 and is available both on Amazon and from McFarland Books – my publisher. However, the best place to get one is to go to my website and buy one. I will send you a signed copy for the same price you would get charged on Amazon for an unsigned one, except that I have to charge for shipping. Anyway, here’s the link to get your signed copy: https://www.nedpatton.com/product-page/the-string-and-glue-of-our-world-signed-copy. And as usual, here are pictures of the covers of both books.
