Voodin Tests LVL Wind Turbine Blades as Fiberglass Alternative

Updated on September 01, 2026 • 7 min read

German startup Voodin Blade Technology is testing 19.3-meter (63-foot) wind turbine blades manufactured from laminated veneer lumber (LVL), revisiting engineered wood as a potential alternative to conventional glass fiber-reinforced composite blades.

The development targets one of the wind industry’s persistent materials challenges: what to do with large thermoset composite blades after decades of service.

Rather than manufacturing a conventional fiberglass shell in molds, Voodin bonds thin layers of wood into an engineered LVL structure and uses computer-controlled machining to produce the blade’s final geometry.

The company ultimately aims to scale the technology beyond its current demonstrator toward the substantially larger blades required by modern utility-scale turbines.

Why Wind Turbine Blades Remain Difficult to Recycle

Modern wind turbine blades are predominantly manufactured using fiber-reinforced polymer composites because they offer the combination of low weight, stiffness, strength and fatigue performance required by increasingly large rotor structures.

Glass fiber reinforcement is widely used, while carbon fiber can also be incorporated in highly loaded structural areas in some blade designs.

The durability that makes these composites useful during operation also complicates their end of life.

Thermoset matrices form permanently crosslinked structures during curing and cannot subsequently be remelted like conventional thermoplastics.

Several recycling and recovery routes are available or under development, including mechanical size reduction, thermal processing and chemical approaches. However, recovering useful reinforcement and polymer value from large thermoset structures remains technically and economically challenging.

This has encouraged the wind industry to investigate several approaches simultaneously, including recyclable resin systems, thermoplastic composites, improved recycling processes and alternative structural materials.

Voodin is pursuing the last of these.

Nordic Spruce Is Converted Into Engineered LVL

The company’s blade concept uses Nordic spruce laminated veneer lumber rather than glass fiber-reinforced polymer as its primary structural material.

Thin wood veneers are bonded together to create a larger engineered structure.

Voodin then uses computer-controlled machining equipment capable of moving and tilting the cutting head to create the required aerodynamic blade geometry.

This is an important difference from conventional composite blade manufacturing.

Large fiberglass wind blades typically depend on substantial molds in which reinforcement and resin systems are processed into structural shells and other components.

Voodin’s approach is designed to reduce dependence on these large molds by machining the engineered-wood structure directly.

That could potentially provide greater flexibility when blade geometries change because manufacturers would modify digital machining data rather than necessarily producing an entirely new set of large tooling.

Whether that advantage remains economical when blade dimensions increase substantially will depend on manufacturing rate, material utilization, machining time and other production factors.

Wooden Wind Turbine Blades Are Not a New Idea

Although Voodin’s manufacturing approach incorporates modern automation, wood-based wind turbine blades have a longer engineering history.

During the 1980s, NASA worked with U.S. boatbuilder Gougeon Brothers to investigate wood-composite structures for wind turbine blades.

The company had developed expertise in lightweight laminated wood structures using bonded wood and epoxy technology.

According to historical accounts of the program, one wood-composite blade accumulated approximately 8,000 hours of testing before a steel mounting component failed rather than the wooden structure itself.

Gougeon Brothers subsequently manufactured thousands of wood-composite turbine blades, including units supplied for turbines associated with companies such as General Electric and Westinghouse.

Fiberglass composites ultimately became the dominant material system as the wind industry developed larger turbines and industrialized blade production.

Voodin is effectively revisiting the engineered-wood concept with modern digital manufacturing technologies and contemporary wind turbine requirements.

End-of-Life Options Could Be Simpler

The principal argument for LVL is not that the material avoids polymers completely.

The wood veneers still require an adhesive system, and Voodin’s technology therefore should not be described as an entirely resin-free blade.

The potential difference appears at end of life.

Glass fibers embedded in a cured thermoset matrix cannot simply be separated and returned to their original constituents. Mechanical recycling typically reduces the composite into smaller particles or fibers, while thermal and chemical processes require additional processing and can affect the quality or economics of the recovered materials.

Engineered wood can potentially enter more conventional cascading material-use routes.

After appropriate processing, wood material may be reused in lower-value wood products or converted into fibers and particles for other applications. Ultimately, wood residues can also enter energy-recovery routes.

The actual end-of-life pathway for a complete LVL wind blade, however, will also depend on its adhesive content, coatings, protective systems, metallic connections and other materials incorporated into the finished structure.

Professor’s Analysis: Recyclability Is Only Half of the Engineering Question

The attraction of a wooden wind turbine blade is easy to understand when looking at end-of-life processing.

But for composites engineers, recyclability alone cannot determine whether LVL can compete with GFRP at utility scale.

Wind turbine blades are unusual structures.

They must combine very low mass with substantial bending stiffness while surviving millions of fatigue cycles. They operate outdoors for decades under rain, temperature changes, humidity and UV exposure while continuously experiencing aerodynamic and gravitational loading.

As blades become longer, structural requirements become increasingly demanding.

That means Voodin’s critical challenge is not simply demonstrating that a 19.3-meter wooden blade can be manufactured.

The company needs to establish how the material system behaves in terms of fatigue, moisture protection, dimensional stability, adhesive durability, erosion protection and long-term mechanical properties.

Scaling is another important issue.

A 19.3-meter blade is significantly smaller than the blades used on today’s largest wind turbines. Increasing blade length does not produce a simple linear increase in structural loads.

The manufacturing concept therefore needs to demonstrate that engineered wood can remain structurally and economically competitive as rotor dimensions increase.

There is also a sustainability question.

Wood is renewable, but describing an LVL blade as environmentally superior to fiberglass requires consideration of the complete lifecycle: forestry, veneer processing, adhesives, machining, transportation, protective coatings, operating lifetime and end-of-life treatment.

A blade that is easier to recycle but requires substantially more material or has a shorter service life would change that calculation.

For this reason, the strongest case for Voodin’s technology will ultimately come from full lifecycle and long-duration structural data, rather than recyclability alone.

19.3-Meter Blades Enter Real-World Testing

Testing of Voodin’s 19.3-meter blades is underway in Germany.

The company intends to use the program as a step toward much larger blades suitable for modern commercial wind turbines.

If that scaling process succeeds, the technology could introduce another material pathway into an industry currently exploring how to reduce its dependence on difficult-to-recycle thermoset structures.

It is unlikely that engineered wood will simply replace fiberglass across the wind industry.

But the return of wood-composite blade technology several decades after its first serious development demonstrates something important for the composites sector: the future of lightweight structures may not depend on a single material family.

Sometimes, advances in digital manufacturing and lifecycle engineering can make an old material concept worth evaluating again.