Work Package 5
EOLIAN Work Package 5 – Upscale of vitrimer development and manufacturing of wind turbine blade demo – focuses on validation of vitrimer materials through optimization and upscaling of the best performing vitrimer. The vitrimer solution will be used for design and production of the wind turbine blade demonstrator.
The main goal is to design and produce a smart, sensor-assisted vitrimer-based composite blade with a processing technology and production time comparable to that of traditional wind turbine blades and whose environmental impact is lower than the traditional counterpart.
This resin will be scaled up by AEP Polymers. Once the blade prototypes are manufactured, Norvento will provide comparative feedback on the manufacturing of traditional blades versus the vitrimeric approach. Additionally, small wind turbine blade cross sections will be used to validate the operability and durability of the blades.
Moreover, some of these cross sections will undergo a recycling process. The recovered materials will be used again to produce small wind turbine sections and prove vitrimer technology feasibility.
From the design, manufacturing and testing perspective, the project will provide a technical comparison regarding the overall performance of the vitrimer blade compared to the classical E-glass/epoxy blade.
12 m blade FEM analysis. (Image © Norvento.)
Innovative, sustainable materials
In recent years, vitrimer resins produced from sustainable materials have received increasing attention. Thus, the integration of vitrimer properties within bio-based materials appears to be innovative and represents a major opportunity for the development of a circular economy for materials.
The promises of bio-based vitrimers are important, but major challenges will have to be faced to transfer this from an academic concept into real-world materials, starting from a scaled-up approach and moving towards sustainable industrialization process to meet stakeholders’ requirements.
Regarding the fabrics, up to now a suitable material has not been found to replace the E-glass fibres in the composites used for the wind turbine blades. The EOLIAN project will extract design and manufacturing conclusions from the comparison of a traditional E-glass/epoxy blade versus a natural fibre (basalt)/vitrimer solution.
12 m blade cross-section. (Image © Norvento.)
Progress and next steps
To set the foundations of the upscaling work, AEP Polymers has applied its formulation expertise to bridge between Work Package 2 – Development of advanced materials based on dynamic covalent bonds – and Work Package 5.
Working closely with Proplast, Tekniker and Politecnico di Milano, AEP has suggested and developed formulation approaches, aiming to meet the key processing properties (viscosity, pot-life) of blade infusion, sustainability (bio-based content >50%) and glass transition temperature according Norvento’s specifications, and has been testing them against valid benchmarks of industrial use.
Based on the most promising formulations so far, AEP has performed cost and time estimates on different scenarios, to align upscaling activities with the expected production timeline of Norvento.
Norvento has been focused on the reference blade design, using traditional materials, such as glass fabrics and epoxy resin. The blade design process involved multiple aerodynamic, structural and aeroelastic iterations to meet the final solution. The results of aerodynamic and laminates design, as well as loads and failure criteria analysis, confirm that the 12 m blade traditional design fulfils Norvento’s nED100 wind turbine requirements and its future implementation on the market level.
Regarding resources savings, the internal architecture of the blade has been optimized in terms of weight, adjusting the materials consumption to produce less waste in production and end of life, respectively.
Related to three-dimensional structural analysis of the blade, results for the critical buckling load and composite failure criteria demonstrated an adequate margin of safety to failure, validating the blades performance for the considered load cases.
At this point, the design is already finished and ready to share with blade mould manufacturer.
Norvento is currently working on manufacturing the 12 m blade mould and planning the reference blade production.
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