Hot-Pressed Multicomponent Recycled Textile Polymer Blends Reinforced with Ground GFRP from Wind Turbine Blades:...

This study investigates hot-pressed composite plates manufactured from pellets obtained by mechanical recycling of post-consumer textile waste and reinforced with ground glass-fiber-reinforced polymer (GFRP) originating from wind turbine blades. Composite plates with dimensions of 200 × 330 × 8 mm were produced by hot pressing at 240 °C under 2 MPa with a heating and pressing time of 40 min. The recycled textile-derived polymer blend served as the matrix, while ground GFRP was introduced at 0, 10, 20, and 30 wt.%. Mechanical performance was evaluated using flexural and Charpy impact tests. The composites exhibited flexural strengths in the range of 9-13 MPa and impact strengths of 7.3-8.9 kJ m^-2. The results did not reveal a monotonic increase in flexural strength with increasing reinforcement content. The highest average flexural strength was observed for the unreinforced matrix, while the addition of ground GFRP resulted in comparable or slightly lower strength values accompanied by increased scatter at higher reinforcement levels. The observed behaviour may be associated with heterogeneous dispersion of ground GFRP fragments, reduced effective reinforcement length due to mechanical grinding, interfacial constraints, and defect formation within the press-consolidated structure. The findings provide insight into the structure-property relationships of recycled composite systems based on heterogeneous textile-derived polymer blends.