BYK Offers World’s 1st Certified Additive for Wind Power Plants

BYK now has in its portfolio an additive with Germanischer Lloyd certification: BYK-C 8001. 

This means manufacturers of wind turbines can use the polymer coupling agent without further testing in their glass fiber reinforced epoxy resin systems, BYK said. 

As a rule, the rotor blades for wind turbines are manufactured using glass fiber reinforced plastic, a material for which BYK has been supplying products for decades. 

A single-rotor blade often weighs more than four tons – and each wind turbine has three such rotor blades.

BYK-C 8001 enhances the mechanical strength of the material and, consequently, the robustness of the rotor blade, so that longer rotor blades can be manufactured at practically the same weight.

BYK said it decided to apply for BYK-C 8001 to be certified as the first additive worldwide, despite the minimal quantities of the additive used.

BYK-C 8001 leads to a substantial augmentation of the mechanical properties of rotor blades for wind power plants on account of the enhanced glass fiber-matrix bonding. 

Special features include the design freedom and universal applicability, as the product is deployed in a liquid state, making dosage easy using amine hardeners, for example.

The BYK additive enhances the mechanical properties by up to 60 percent since the coupling agent BYK-C 8001 is a copolymer with reactive/surface-active groups that optimizes the mechanical strength and the longevity of the fiber-reinforced resins in the rotor blades. 

Results of fatigue tests directly indicate longer blade life. Another special feature is that it is deployable “irrespective of age” with every epoxy-compatible glass fiber fabric – while maintaining consistently high quality in the finished component.