ORNL researchers honored with a prestigious “ACE Award for Composites Excellence”
The recognition came for creating a fully recyclable, lightweight wind turbine blade tip that incorporates low-cost carbon fiber and conductive coating.
Researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) were recently honored with a prestigious “ACE Award for Composites Excellence” by the American Composites Manufacturers Association. The team won the “Innovation in Green Composites Design” prize for creating a fully recyclable, lightweight wind turbine blade tip that incorporates low-cost carbon fiber and conductive coating for enhanced protection against lightning strikes.
The award recognizes a composite product that demonstrates the greatest innovation for reducing its environmental footprint or extending its life cycle. ACE Winners were announced at the 10th annual Composites and Advanced Materials Expo in San Diego.
“This one award encompassed three different technologies from ORNL: We made the blade with ORNL’s low-cost carbon fiber, treated it with a conductive coating we developed, and designed it to be 100 percent recyclable,” said ORNL Researcher Vipin Kumar, who led the project.
The wind blade tip and its low-cost carbon fiber were created in the Department of Energy’s Carbon Fiber Technology Facility. Incorporating a recyclable thermoset epoxy resin with multiple layers of carbon and glass fiber, the blade tip is 41 percent lighter for greater efficiency at capturing energy to generate electricity. After the turbine blade’s normal life cycle, the fabrics within can be fully recovered, leaving only a polymer residue which can be used in new products.
“This project is another fantastic example of the innovative thinking coming from our composites research,” said Yarom Polsky, Director of the Manufacturing Science Division at ORNL. “The relatively simple approach for breaking down and collecting the resin for reuse, while keeping the fiber largely intact, addresses many of the current challenges to recycling blades that are conventionally manufactured.”
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