Wind turbines, a composition of many materials solidly anchored together made recycling impossible

Wind is a pillar of renewable energy production and, for years, it has been exploiting itself with increasing interest by building and installing turbines that can intercept the wind and create electricity.

Despite the first information that has come to us from the past about the use of wind for mechanical purposes dates back to the 1st century AD by the Greek Engineer Heron of Alexandria,the force of the wind at the time was mainly exploited in the naval field, to fill the sails and create the motion of boats on the water.

Around the 9th century AD. It began in India, Iran and China, to use the wind to spin canvases that could give a force to a transmission system, through which new mechanized work could be performed, such as grinding grains, pumping water or performing certain activities in the construction field.

In Europe, windmills spread widely, especially in the Netherlands,using them to pump water from land below sea level. This operation was so important in the reclamation operations, that the windmill assumed a representative figure of the country.

To see the use of wind in electricity generation, we had to wait until 1887 when Professor James Blyth built the first wind turbine in his watch to power his cottage. The result was so encouraging that in 1891 he filed the patent.

In the following years, many other inventors and scientists studied, tested and patented, improvements on the ideal number of blades to best benefit wind strength, their profile, the mechanical systems of the rotors, and the correct heights of turbine installation.

Wind turbines, non-metallic,are formed by a cluster of products whose prevalence consists of balsa wood, plastic, fiberglass, and to a lesser extent carbon fibers and various metals.

The life cycle of a wind farm can be considered around 25 years old and, recently, the first wave of disused turbines has been presented. We take into account that, in Germany alone, around 15,000 blades are expected to be recycled in 2024.

The difficulty of separating the elements that make up the artifact caused the German WKI Institute to set in motion, which studied how to separate balsa wood from plastic parts and fiberglass, in order to recover the wooden parts to build new insulation panels for buildings.

In a rotor blade it can hold up to 15 cubic meters of balsa, a very light and very durable wood, but being solidified with fiberglass and plastic, it was considered a non-recyclable waste and ended up in incineration plants or cements as fuel.

The WKI Institute, after several attempts, realized that the components could be separated by exploiting their toughness,in fact by inserting the product into a rotating mill and hurling the piece against metal parts, the balsa broke down from the fiberglass and plastic pieces.

The recovered balsa was sold to the production plants of ultralight sound insulation panels, in fact, these, reach a density of about 20 kg. per cubic meter and their performance is comparable to the polystyrene panels.

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