Carbon Nanotube Wind Turbine Blades: How Far Are We Today from Laboratory Tests to Industrial Implementation?

Abstract

With a few works in 2010 on the application of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) in wind turbine blades (WTBs), new hope has arrived promising to conquer the so-far used materials. From that moment, several dozens of publications have been published confirming that CNTs—typically considered as “universal soldiers” in the composite, hybrid, and hierarchical materials—could be a reliable component of WTBs. However, all of the experimental results, in a few cases supported by theoretical models, were obtained only at the laboratory scale. This review intends to answer the title question by summarizing the up-to-now efforts and comparing the levels of outperformance of CNT-based WTBs. The general conclusion from the review is that the physicochemical and mechanical properties of CNT-based WTBs, although promising, must be balanced by economy and technological aspects, with the reliability of large-scale synthesis and standardization of CNT batches as the key aspects.