EoLO-HUBs is the acronym for “Wind turbine blades End of Life through Open HUBs for circular materials in sustainable business models”, our project has the ambition to recover glass and carbon fibre from wind turbine blades at the end of their useful lives and create a knowledge hub to facilitate the recycling.
AITIIP is the project coordinator of EoLO-HUBs, and additionally has a relevant role in the technical developments within the project, with its core activities in the development of flexible cutting tools and de-coating techniques. Both activities belong to the decommissioning stage of the end-of-life process that the project addresses and are crucial for the preparation of the materials to be recycled.
- Water jet-cutting is a powerful and versatile industrial cut process that uses a high-pressure stream of water, or a mixture of water and abrasive materials. Aitiip’s experience in aeronautics recycling comes in handy here.
- De-coating refers to the removal of the wind turbine blades’ (WTB) protective layers, often involving plastics and resins for weathering and UV protection.
As we have entered our project’s 2nd year, our technical team is building a portable automated solution for the integration of water-jet cutting and robotics. Our first complete prototype will be ready this summer.
On the decoating side, our team is testing different mechanical and chemical techniques on turbine blades’ surfaces to determine the best and more efficient solution, balancing product and environmental performances. With the first results already available for different methods, our solution will be also ready for pre-industrial scale up during this summer, as other technologies and tools in the project that will be included in EOLO´s project demonstrators for our DEMO site implementation during the next stages of EoLO-HUBs.
