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The first generation of wind turbines are being retired, and a tremendous number of wind tur-bine blades are coming out of service. Architects and engineers are developing re-use ideas for these blades and are wrestling with their complex geometries and materiality. This paper details a four-phase process for reconstructing the geometry of wind turbine blades, starting from a point-cloud scan and finishing with a digital model that represents the blade and its associated properties. The process builds on earlier work that created an airfoil database to store the nor-malized coordinates of publicly available airfoil profiles. This profile database is traversed to match airfoil shapes to cross-sections found in the point-cloud. Root, transition, and airfoil shapes are matched to cross-sections along the full blade to reconstruct the outer geometry. Based on data from the interior of the blade, the structural spar box is reconstructed. The addi-tion of thickness and material property data allows for calculation of section properties at multi-ple stations along the blade. The resulting 3D geometry and the associated data is used for ar-chitectural design and engineering calculations to develop second-life applications for wind blades. The paper demonstrates the workflow through examples from a GE 37-meter blade and an LM 13.4-meter blade. 

The purpose of this study was to develop a replicable methodology for testing the capabilities and characteristics of a wind turbine blade in a structural re-use application with the specific goal of creating and demonstrating an efficient and commercially viable wind blade pedestrian bridge design. Wind energy experienced a dramatic increase in popularity following the turn of the century and it is now a common source of renewable energy around the world. However, while wind turbines are able to produce clean energy while in service, turbine blades are designed for a fatigue life of only about 20 years. With the difficulty and costs associated with recycling the composite material blades used on the turbines, wind power companies choose to dispose of decommissioned blades in landfills instead. The Re-Wind BladeBridge project aims to promote a more sustainable life cycle for wind power by demonstrating that decommissioned wind turbine blades have the capability to be repurposed as structural elements in bridges. This paper presents an analysis and characterization of a LM 13.4 wind blade from a Nordex N29 turbine, along with a design for a pedestrian bridge using two LM 13.4 wind blades to create a 5-meter span bridge. Software developed by the Re-Wind team called “BladeMachine” was used to generate the engineering properties of the blade at multiple sections along the blade length. Resin burnout tests and mechanical testing in tension and compression were performed to determine the material and mechanical properties of the composite materials in the blade. Additionally, a four-point edgewise bending test was performed on a 4-meter section of the wind blade to evaluate its load carrying behavior. The results of these tests revealed that the LM 13.4 blades are suitable to be re-utilized as girders for a short-span pedestrian bridge. An overview of the design of the BladeBridge currently under construction in County Cork, Ireland is presented, including details on the architectural and structural design processes. 

The production of wind energy worldwide has increased 20-fold since 2001. Composite material wind turbine blades, typically designed for a 20-year fatigue life, are beginning to come out of service in large numbers. In general, these de-commission blades, composed primarily of glass fibers in a thermoset matrix, are demolished and landfilled. There is little motivation for recycling the composite materials, as the processes for reclaiming the fibers (solvolysis, pyrolysis) have not been proven to be economically viable. This research seeks to establish structural re-use applications for wind turbine blades in civil engineering infrastructure, hypothesizing that advanced composite materials may be an attractive alternative to conventional infrastructure materials (e.g. steel, reinforced concrete). This paper presents an analysis and materials characterization of a 47 meter Clipper C96 wind blade. The primarily numerical analysis is accompanied by materials characterization taken from an un-used Clipper blade donated to the project from the Wind Turbine Testing Center (WTTC). The paper presents a brief background on wind turbine blade adaptive re-use, proposing a hypothetical load bearing application of the Clipper wind blade as an electrical transmission tower structure carrying axial compression, along with flapwise and edgewise bending forces. The paper summarizes the composite laminates and cross-section geometries of the blade and establishes the axial and flexural stiffnesses of the blade at multiple sections along the blade length. From a first-order estimation of applied loads for the tower application, the resulting stresses in the composite materials are estimated and compared to the design material properties for the wind blade as originally constructed. 

This paper presents a method for the digital reconstruction of the geometry of a wind turbine blade from a point-cloud model to polysurface model. The digital reconstruction of the blade geometry is needed to develop computer models that can be used by architects and engineers to design and analyze blade parts for reuse and recycling of decommissioned wind turbine blades. Initial studies of wind-blade geometry led to the creation of an airfoil database that stores the normalized coordinates of publicly-available airfoil profiles. A workflow was developed in which these airfoil profiles are best-fitted to targeted cross-sections of point-cloud representations of a blade. The method for best-fitting airfoil curves is optimized by minimizing the distance between points sampled on the curve and point-cloud cross section. To demonstrate the workflow, a digitally-created point-cloud model of a 100 m blade developed by Sandia National Laboratory was used to test the reconstruction routine. 

This paper discusses the opening moves of an international multidisciplinary research project involving researchers from Ireland, Northern Ireland and the US, aiming to address the global problem of end-of-life disposal of wind turbine blades. The problem is one of enormous scale on several levels: a typical 2.0 MW turbine has three 50m long blades containing around 20 tonnes of fibre reinforced plastic (FRP). It is estimated that by 2050, 39.8 million tonnes of material from the global wind industry will await disposal. Whilst land-fill is the current means of disposal, the nature of the materials used in the composite construction of wind blades (glass and carbon fibres, resins, foams) means it unsustainable. Hence, the project sets out to deploy innovative design and logistical concepts for reusing and recycling these blades. The project begins within an innovative joint design studio, staged between Queen’s University Belfast and the Georgia Institute of Technology, where architecture students will, within the highly-constrained contexts of the blade properties and the potential reuse sites, systematically generate, filter, and prototype a selection of proposals, reusing the decommissioned wind turbine blades in buildings, infrastructure, landscape, and public art. The paper analyzes the potential and challenges of considering this highly constrained and yet multidisciplinary problem within the context of a Masters level Architecture studio. The paper concludes with an analysis of how outcome-driven design problems challenge traditional design studio cultures, acknowledging the need to make processes and ideas more explicit in order to categorise, analyse, rank and refine proposed architectural solutions.