There may, finally, be some use for all those accumulating used wind turbine blades.
The paper to which I'll refer in this post is this one: Upcycling of Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer for Thermal Management Application Fujie Wang, Peiling Kang, and Shuangqiao Yang Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2024 63 (16), 7196-7205
As I have frequently pointed out, the wind industry, besides its reliability problem, has a liability problem, the accumulation of huge amounts of composite polymers associated with the massive vanes.
I calculated, some time back, based on the Master Register of Wind Turbines that was maintained by the Danish Energy Agency up until 2022, that the average life of a wind turbine is substantially less than 20 years:
A Commentary on Failure, Delusion and Faith: Danish Data on Big Wind Turbines and Their Lifetimes.
It appears that the Danes have stopped updating the Master Register, possibly because it was bad for the wind business in that country, Denmark, where another big source of revenue is offshore oil and gas drilling.
Anyway, massive used wind turbine blades, composite materials (which shed plastics in use) are piling up all over the world, and for a long time, it's been very difficult to figure out what to do with them.
From the paper cited at the outset:
...Thermal conductive materials play a pivotal role as functional components extensively deployed in heat exchange, electronic heat dissipation, and other critical domains. (12) The development of high thermal conductive composite materials bears paramount importance. (13,14) Polymers, characterized by their lightweight nature, cost-effectiveness, and facile processability, serve as excellent substrates for heat-conductive composites. (15) However, the inherent amorphous structure and facile phonon scattering in polymers typically result in low thermal conductivity levels (0.1–0.3 W/mK). (16−18) Notably, the incorporation of thermally conductive filler into polymer has garnered substantial attention due to the facile processability of the resultant composite and the good thermal conductivity exhibited by the polymer–filler combination...
Effective means of heat transfer is a key to a sustainable world in my view, a key element of process intensification by which we may use nuclear heat to raise energy efficiency to unprecedented levels not presently seen in thermal devices, thus lowering the cost of energy and allowing for the benefits of access to energy to be extended to the billions of people who lack it.
The process offered by the authors involves mechanical milling of various types, followed by chemical incorporation of boron nitride into the resulting matrix.
There is a fad floating around claiming that the solution to the intractable energy problem that is literally choking and burning the planet as a whole is to "electrify everything." In my view, this is a terrible idea, since electricity by its very nature is thermodynamically degraded. Thermal energy, by contrast, is as close to primary energy as one gets, and the use of heat exchange networks can recovery exergy from thermal energy now treated as waste, and in fact, can reduce the problems associated with thermal management.
The wind fad, which is not sustainable, is going to leave huge piles of waste, and it is nice to think that there is a path to putting these materials to use in a far cleaner nuclear powered world, should the world come to its senses, not a good bet, but a feasible bet.
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