Wind power generation, as a representative of clean energy, has been developing rapidly. The design life of wind turbines is approximately 20-25 years, and a large number of wind turbines are retired every year. The valuable parts of wind turbines for recycling include towers, bases, engine covers, blades, etc. Among them, 85% -90% of scrapped materials have mature recycling systems, but the recycling mode of fan blades is still being explored.
The widely used fan blade materials are composed of thermosetting resin based composite materials reinforced with glass fiber, mainly including epoxy resin, glass fiber, light wood, etc. After curing and forming, the chemical process cannot be reversed, and without new process treatment, it cannot degrade naturally. Among them, the most valuable fiber materials and epoxy resin are difficult to separate and reuse.
The traditional blade treatment methods mainly involve landfill and incineration, but landfill occupies a large amount of land resources and is not environmentally friendly. Incineration also increases costs and environmental pressures in terms of operation and energy consumption emissions. So countries around the world are actively exploring ways to recycle leaves. The most commonly used recycling method at present is to first cut the huge blades into small pieces, and then carry out crushing, separation, etc. to complete a series of subsequent processing steps for resource recycling and utilization.
In the recycling process, we can see that shredding is an essential part, and GEP ECOTECH's double shaft shredder and single rotor fine shredder have provided many users with solutions for blade shredding and recycling. Double shaft shredder can shred the blades to a size of about 10-20cm, and then through the shredding of single rotor fine shredder, the size of the shredded blades is further reduced to 3-5cm, which is conducive to the next step of recycling.
If you are interested in this market and want to learn more about the system recycling of fan blades, please be sure to contact GEP ECOTECH!
