University of North Dakota (UND) Professor of Mechanical Engineering Surojit Gupta has been awarded a $3.7 million grant to study the feasibility of recycling wind turbine blades, a topic of increasing importance with the rise in wind power development.
The grant’s research will be conducted in collaboration with co-principal investigators from UND, including Professor of Chemistry Yun Ji and Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Hallie Chelmo. Beth Klemetsrud, assistant professor of chemical engineering, will lead the project’s life cycle assessment in collaboration with the Idaho National Laboratory.
The grant will cover a period of three years, with $3 million of the funds coming directly from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). An additional $500,000 will come from the North Dakota Industrial Commission, with local sources rounding out the total.
UND will partner with Grand Forks-based Singularity Energy Technologies (SET), led by its founder and president Nikhil Patel. Hasan Jamil, associate professor of computer science at the University of Idaho and Yingqian Lin, researcher of bioenergy at the Idaho National Laboratory, will assist with carrying out the grant’s research activity.
The team will also employ UND graduate students and postdoctoral scholars.
Gupta, whose research interests center around sustainable materials, called the difficulty of recycling turbine blades “a major impediment to adopting wind energy.” He said most turbine blades that have reached their useful lifespan – typically around 20 years – end up in landfills.
“Currently, the major problem is that everything is going underground in landfills,” said Gupta. “Recently, the North Dakota Legislature has passed legislation that restricts blades being dumped in landfills in North Dakota. Similar legislation is getting in place all over the country. There are places in Texas and Iowa where they have sites filled with blades.”
In addition to the University of Idaho and Idaho National Laboratory, UND will partner with Grand Forks-based energy companies to carry out research.
“As a part of that, we will work with local companies such as LM Wind Power, as well as our partner in the proposal is SET Technologies,” he said. “They (SET) have gasification technology that can recycle wind blades. It’s a major award.”
Gupta said that a comprehensive recycling matrix composed of various propriety degradation processes and gasification will be used to recycle turbine blades holistically, converting fibers into material suitable for uses such as construction and resin into different composite systems.
