Natural fiber blades

[Aurélie Guibert]

Hello guys !

I would like to propose a project within the technology WG :

Some friends of mine started a project in Bengladesh few years ago, to make boats and other objects with a composite made from Jute fiber (a natural fiber that is very much found in their country). If you want to know more : Gold of Bengal

It gave me the idea of trying natural fiber blades for our wind turbines.

Udaya (in Sri Lanka) is making and selling Piggott turbines with fiber glass blades. I will go to meet him in Sri Lanka at the beginning 2018 for some projects, and we thought it was a good opportunity to start something.

Natural fiber composite could be an alternative to fiber glass that many WindEmpowerment members are using for making the blades. And it could be adapted to everyone's local ressources.

I've got few questions :

- Does anyone in the network ever tryed it ? Could she/he tell us more about it ?

- Who would be interested into such a project ? Could we work together, trying with different fibers and meeting regularly on skype to exchange on our issues and solutions ?

- Would WindEmpowerment support us in this project, throught the technology WG or maybe a SEPS call ?

Thanks for your answers !

Aurélie

[Nick Warren]

I love this idea, and would be very interested to see responses as well!  

Along the sime line of thinking, we dabbled ever so breifly with the idea of organic resins, but found we had to import them here in Peru at exhorbinant costs.  If memory serves though, they worked fine.

[Aurélie Guibert]

Here is an answer of Marko (Netherland). Marko, you can reply on the forum so everyone see it (we-techn...@googlegroups.com).

We will try with Udaya in 2018 to make blades with coconut fibre, does anyone tried with this ?

Hi Aurélie

 

I have been working for some time on Jute fiber composite blades for a Hugh Piggott type turbine in different educational projects. We are now at the second generation and tested the blades successfully to full loading, currently a group of students is building the turbine and it is planned to be finished in January 2018.

 

Here you see a picture of the blades and the moulds:

 

I am happy to help you with this and provide you with more information

 

Kind regards,

 

Marko Bosman

[Katerina Troullaki]

Hi everyone,

I don't have any knowledge on natural fiber blades but I am very interested to learn more about it. For example what kind of equipment and space is needed to manufacture them? Could we use 3D printers?

Regarding coconut fiber, a colleague just told me that a friend of his runs a project in Brazil that utilizes coconut residues to produce coconut fiber products. He will put us in contact, so I will share more information soon.

I am also interested to compare natural fiber blades with other material blades as far as their environmental impact is concerned. I am starting to do a Life Cycle Assessment on small wind turbines this period, and the blade material is an interesting parameter to study. For this, I will need some data about the manufacturing process from people who are already constructing natural fiber blades (for example, Marko or Aurelie's friends in Bangladesh or even better both!). 

The result will be to quantify the environmental benefit (if any) from using natural fiber for blades and use it as an argument and as a motivation to improve the home-built turbines. I will really appreciate if you can help me in this with your data!

Cheers,

Katerina

[Marko Bosman]

Hi Katerina,

the process to make the composite blades is described in the attached report, you could use this for your Life Cycle Assessment. This is about glass fibers, but natural fibers can be treated the same, but with extra care to dry them before laminating. We put every ply in a microwave oven for 5 minutes. The report describes hand lamination, we did vacuum infusion because it is less messy and gives more consistent quality, but you need a vacuum pump. The resin we used was epoxy, this is not the best ecological choice; there are natural resins available in the market, to improve the ecological footprint.

I think the use of 3D printers is very interesting; e.g. you could print the core and laminate around it, avoiding the need for molds and troubles with demolding also the quality will improve because you do not have to attach the two blade skins, probably it will be lighter too. I would really like learn more about this.

regards,

Marko

Op donderdag 2 november 2017 16:22:03 UTC+1 schreef Katerina Troullaki: