Using glass fibers to upcycle fibers from decommissioned wind turbine blades

Kat Gilmore on December 11, 2025

Kenan Song and a research team from the UGA New Materials Institute developed a novel process to recycle glass fiber-reinforced polymer waste from decommissioned wind turbine blades into high-performance fiber materials.

Recycling glass fiber-reinforced polymer (GFRP), which wind turbine blades are primarily composed of, is a large obstacle in reusing composite materials. Current methods either result in low-value materials or present a large cost and energy burden for its processing. Recent collaborative research from a team in the Advanced Materials Advanced Manufacturing Laboratory (AMAML), in the UGA New Materials Institute, focuses on a novel process to recycle GFRP waste into high-performance composite fibers.

The team repurposed WTB-derived glass fibers (GF) into high-performance polyacrylonitrile (PAN)-GF composite fibers through a scalable dry-jet wet spinning and forced assembly process. By integrating layers of PAN and PAN-GF, the team controlled the layer thickness down to the micrometer scale. The fibers in the reinforced PAN matrix can then be carbonized through a heat-treatment process and converted into functional carbon fiber materials.

The resulting composite fibers exhibited higher crystallinity, larger crystallite sizes, and significantly enhanced mechanical properties compared to pure PAN fibers. The fibers also exhibited improved thermal stabilization and flame resistance, both critical properties for applications in aerospace, defense, and other extreme environments.

“Multilayered Fabrication Containing Wind Turbine Blade Solid Wastes for High-Performance Composite Fibers,” was published in ACS Materials Au. It was coauthored by Varunkumar Thippanna, Arunachalam Ramanathan, Dhanush Patil, M. Taylor Sobczak, Taylor G. Theobald, Sri Vaishnavi Thummalapalli, Xiao Sun, Churan Yu, Ian Doran, Chao Sui, Joshua Were, Xianqiao Wang, Sui Yang, Xin Xu, Arunachala Nadar Mada Kannan, Amir Asadi, Ayman Nafady, Abdullah M. Al-Enizi, Mohammad K. Hassan, and Kenan Song.

“Turbine-to-Textile: Upcycling Wind Turbine Blade Waste into High-Performance PAN Composite Fibers,” was published recently in ACS Applied Polymer Materials. It was coauthored by Varunkumar Thippanna, Xiao Sun, M. Taylor Sobczak, Arunachalam Ramanathan, Taylor G. Theobald, Ian Doran, Joshua Were, Libin Yang, James Jaraczewski, James Casey, Vladislav V. Klepov, Liang Liang, Stephen Nolet, Arunachala Nadar Mada Kannan, Xin Xu and Kenan Song. 

To read about this group’s previous work with recycling wind turbine blades, click here.