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From blades to tracks: a case study in structural reuse of curved surfaces for circular design
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From blades to tracks: a case study in structural reuse of curved surfaces for circular design

Jesse Pupping, Marzia Riso, Mariana Popescu, Adrien Bousseau, Jelle Joustra
ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication (SCF) - 2025
Download the publication : BladeReuse4PumpTrack.pdf [71Mo]  
We explore the fabrication of curved surfaces by reusing panels extracted from decommissioned wind turbine blades, using cycling pumptracks as a case study. We first present real-world prototypes of pumptrack modules that we manufactured to evaluate the practicality of this reuse scenario and to define the boundary conditions for harvesting blade panels and assembling a track. We then propose an algorithm to optimize the segmentation of a wind turbine blade into quadrilateral panels whose sides fall within a small set of compatible boundaries. These panels form a library of modules that designers can connect side by side to create pumptracks of various lengths and curvatures. Together, these contributions provide a proof-of-concept of how computer-aided design and manufacturing can support circular design through the reuse of curved surfaces.

Images and movies

teaser.png [814Ko]
TrackVirtual.png [100Ko]
 

See also

See the video of the testing event made by the TU Delft New Media Center:


Acknowledgements and Funding

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback. This work was supported by the TU Delft Climate Action Funding and by an Adobe software donation. The wind turbine blade materials were supplied by Fraunhofer IWES, Bremerhaven. We thank Berend Baas for discussions on the problem formulation and optimization algorithm, and Sammie van der Vinne, Robbert Kik and Isabel Koopman for initial explorations of reuse scenarios. Finally, we thank Boris Kloeg, Ruben Gabriels, Ivo Neuman, Israel Carrete and Rushabh Mutha for the inspiring discussions on structural reuse of windturbine blades.

BibTex references

@InProceedings{PRPBJ25,
  author       = "Pupping, Jesse and Riso, Marzia and Popescu, Mariana and Bousseau, Adrien and Joustra, Jelle",
  title        = "From blades to tracks: a case study in structural reuse of curved surfaces for circular design",
  booktitle    = "ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication (SCF)",
  year         = "2025",
  publisher    = "ACM",
  url          = "http://www-sop.inria.fr/reves/Basilic/2025/PRPBJ25"
}

Other publications in the database

» Marzia Riso
» Adrien Bousseau