From blades to tracks: a case study in structural reuse of curved surfaces for circular design
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3745778.3766656.pdf
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67.73 MB
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Adobe PDF
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Author(s)
Pupping, Jesse
Riso, Marzia
Popescu, Mariana
Bousseau, Adrien
Joustra, Jelle
Date Issued
November 19, 2025
Publisher
ACM|ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication
Citation
Jesse Pupping, Marzia Riso, Mariana Popescu, Adrien Bousseau, and Jelle Joustra. 2025. From blades to tracks: a case study in structural reuse of curved surfaces for circular design. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication (SCF '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 1, 1–11.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
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.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3745778.3766656
