Aussie inventor solves daunting problem facing wind farms

A team of Aussie inventors have created a new solution to the daunting problem of what to do with a growing waste stream — carbon and glass fibre composites (CFRP).

While you may not have heard of this product you’ve definitely seen it. Valued for being lightweight and incredibly strong, it’s used in “high-end” products like wind turbine blades, hydrogen tanks, building construction, planes and electric vehicles.

But like, all new manmade technologies, they have a reasonably short lifespan. Wind turbine blades can stretch over 100 metres in length, but they generally can only be seen blowing in the wind for 20 to 25 years before they become inefficient — less if they’re struck by lightning or crash into a bird. So what happens when they are no longer needed?

Quick facts:

• Wind farm and aircraft CPFR waste could reach 840,300 tonnes annually by 2050

• CPFR manufacture is set to increase by 60 per cent over the next decade.

• Dr Hadigheh's team patented a machine to precisely align recycled carbon fibres

Composites like coffee cups difficult to recycle

Until now, “green-energy essentials” like turbine blades have mostly been dumped in landfill as they’ve been hard to recycle. That’s hardly surprising when you think that any product made of multiple materials is tricky to break apart and melt down — for instance, disposable coffee cups generally have a hidden plastic lining, and that’s why they usually go in your red bin, not the yellow.

Wanting to prevent this needless waste, Sydney University’s Dr Ali Hadigheh and his team of highly-intelligent researchers have been working to produce technology to separate the two bonded materials and then recycle the carbon fibres.

“This is a very precious material, and just a few countries produce it,” he said. “In case there is a future supply chain issue, we need to be careful about every part of them. So we need to target recycling and reusing them in high-end not low-grade products.”

Can you explain how the recycling process works?

Tearing the bonds apart wasn’t easy, and previous attempts had been uncomfortably energy intensive. The new method involves a hybrid thermochemical system. That means the material is exposed to a chemical reaction called solvolysis and then a high-temperature process called pyrolysis that further deconstructs them.

With the use of solvolysis, less heat was needed during the pyrolysis process, and this resulted in less energy used. Reusing them only requires 20 per cent of what’s usually required to create virgin material.

The researchers have also found the fibres retrieved during the process were much longer than previous attempts and had a strength retention of 93 per cent. This was comparable to steel, and twice as strong as aluminium, making it a lightweight alternative to these products.

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Dr Hadigheh said a South Korean industrial company has already shown interest in another of his patented inventions, and the recycling technology is ready to be adapted for market, but there’s one problem.

“We’ve demonstrated we can use this recycling for different types of sectors, but in Australia, we don’t have an active industry. There are none planning at recycling of these composites,” he said.

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