부산대학교 도서관

Currently, there is still no knowledge of the potential uses of the increasing post-industrial fiberglass fabric wastegenerated from wind turbine manufacturing industries. The present work proposes reusing this fiberglass fabric waste asreinforcement in new thermosetting polymer composites. Polyester composites with different numbers and stackingsequences of stitched and random scraps of fiberglass fabrics were prepared using a resin transfer molding process. Moreover, their thermal stability, flexural and tensile properties were evaluated. Results of the statistical analysis performedaccording to Tukey’s methodology indicated that the number of fiberglass layers is the decisive factor influencing themechanical properties of the developed composites, whereas their stacking sequence does not have a significant influence. The composites with four layers of fiberglass fabric waste showed promising mechanical properties with flexural and tensilestrengths higher than 205 and 115 MPa, respectively, and Young’s Modulus higher than 2700 MPa, enabling their use innumerous applications. On the other hand, the number of fiberglass fabric layers had only a small influence on the thermalstability of the composites of around 335 ºC. Overall results showed that reusing fiberglass fabric waste as reinforcement innew polymer composites is a feasible way to valorize this waste from wind turbine industries.