In this episode, we dive into the world of ultrasonic inspections—a crucial need for damaged wind turbine blades. But here’s the twist: turbines have been set up in some seriously remote and offshore locations. Join us as we uncover the exciting partnership between Chris Cieslak of BladeBUG and Lars Boye Vesth of FORCE Technology. They’ve joined forces to conquer the challenges of performing ultrasonic inspections in these hard-to-reach spots. Get ready for a fascinating discussion that reveals their innovative approach to this demanding task!

BladeBug – https://www.bladebug.co.uk
FORCE Technology – https://forcetechnology.com
Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Wind Power Lab – https://windpowerlab.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! 

BladeBUG FORCE Interview

Allen Hall: I’m Allen Hall host of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast and we have a great discussion today with BladeBUG and FORCE Technology from the show floor of global offshore wind in London, England, where it’s also about 30 degrees Celsius and Sunny, very unusual day there. BladeBUG is a UK-based company that develops robotic devices for the inspection repair of wind turbine blades.

The company’s flashing product BladeBUG robot is a self-powered autonomous robot that can climb and inspect wind turbine blades without the need for human intervention. BladeBUG was founded by our guest today, Chris Cieslak. And Chris, welcome to the program.

Chris Cieslak: Thank you for having me back again. Yeah, pleasure to be here.

Allen Hall: Thank you. And we have Lars Vesth with FORCE Technology with us also. FORCE Technology is based in Denmark and also Office of Variety of consulting and engineering services in several industries, including the renewable energy industry. Course technology is also a leader in ultrasonic inspections and inspection devices.

Lars, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. So you have a really interesting partnership going and, and Chris, why don’t you start off and describe what the, this partnership is. 

Chris Cieslak: So this is, this is a continuation of, of BladeBUG’s robotic platform integrating, like really high quality ultra non-destructive testing systems.

And we have collaborated, we’ve teamed up with, with FORCE Technology. To use their equipment, which is used for the last 20 years on inspecting wind turbines in factories and mount a sort of reduced version of that within the BladeBUG robot to enable the same inspections to be formed out in the field.

Yeah, 

Allen Hall: and that’s remarkable because as we all know, there’s a lot of damage blazes out there, and one of the most difficult tasks is to understand how deep that damage is and how large this damage is. Paint and coatings cover up most of the damage, so a lot of times. When technicians get out in the field and they start looking around at blade damage, they realize this is a lot worse than I thought.

And that’s where FORCE Technology comes in because FORCE Technology can see, see the things that the human eye can’t see. And, and Lars your technology and your sonic knowledge is remarkable. Just I’ve, I’ve heard about your company for quite a while. I just, I’ve been researching it more recently.

You want to describe what ultrasonic technology you guys possess right now? As 

Lars Boye Vesth: Chris said, we have been working with the industry for many years. We have been supplying equipment for manufacturing quality control. On the factory floor for, for many years. And the reason is that the ultrasonic equipment that we have developed and, and manufacture, it has some special capabilities when it comes to finding small defects and composite materials, and that’s very useful on the, on the factory floor, but equally useful in service looking for both.

Production floors, which should have been found on the production floor, but also damaged from 

Allen Hall: operation. Yeah. And the, the FORCE Technology inspection capability is obviously world renowned. There’s there’s different kinds of, of inspections and tools that you can use to inspect some of these blades.

What specific piece of equipment are we, are you going to install in blade plug to do these? Out in the field 

Lars Boye Vesth: inspections, we are basically using the same technology as we’re using in the, in the workshop. So it’s, it’s technology where you can rapidly scan with a high resolution and find virtually all kind of defects that might be a risk for the, for the blades in its lifetime.

Allen Hall: So the, the key here for any sort of ultrasonic inspection is you have to have the right tools and you have to have high quality tools because. Doing ultrasonic inspection on composites is really difficult. And so I think this makes a lot of sense. The partnership between you two, you gotta have to have the best instruments and then you have to have a platform that can use them in the right way.

And, and Chris play Bug’s really seems set up to do sort of a scanning of an area just because of the way BladeBUG has, has been designed. Yeah, exactly. So we, 

Chris Cieslak: we’ve got the ability to maneuver probes and scanners over the surface of the blade in an unlimited. Sort of bounded area. So, you know, people do do it.

You have frames where you have x y gantries, but we don’t need that. We can do that with the robot. It’s unlimited. That can be repeated. You don’t need to be an expert in NDTs in order to operate it. We rely on the technology of the robot to perform the high quality motions. But then at the same time, you’ve got the software from FORCE Technology, which can assess whether the scan is good.

So you, if it’s not, you can go back and redo that area, which is. If you haven’t got good coupling or if there’s some kind of issue, that level of automation has already been developed and has been widely used for a number of years by FORCE. And so again, it’s just leveraging their, their skills and expertise to ensure that we get this high quality scan data to actually use.

Allen Hall: Yeah, that’s really key. Having any user of ultrasonic technology, the software seems to be the magic piece. A lot of times you have to start with good instruments, but then analyzing that data. Software wise is really key because you, you need to be sure you have really valid data and FORCE Technology has been doing a lot of work in that.

And I, and I think the latest thing I seen from FORCE technology has, you’ve been using a little bit of ai. On ultrasonic 

Lars Boye Vesth: data. That’s right. We’ve actually been working on this part for, for many years, starting out seven, eight years ago. And, and the training machine learning model to find various kinds of defects, and that has requires as Chris mentioned a lot of data and a lot of experience in how to to evaluate this data.

So we have been training a computer. Basically to do what what human beings are doing today. Evaluating data, looking for small defects, and finding out if they are severe or not. Okay, 

Allen Hall: so the, the FORCE Technology sensors and the FORCE technology software are in the, the belly or the bay of the BladeBUG.

It’s gonna take that scan, that data is. The way I understand it is it’s gonna go offsite and to be looked at by someone knowledgeable on ultrasonic inspections. Is that still the plan? 

Chris Cieslak: That’s definitely one form. The, the other element is, is using that machine learning and AI to automatically interpret what those scan data is generating.

So, you know, understanding where you’ve got defects. I think there’s always gonna be elements of having someone maybe to overlook at some of the data if it’s something new or something un uncertain, but a lot of that groundwork, so I think As I said earlier, you know you, you can reduce like a blade scan analysis from 12 hours down to like one to two minutes.

So it, it’s, it doesn’t need to be this big sort of you know, you’re getting lots and lots of data, but then you, they’ve also built the software to analyze that data very efficiently and very quickly so that data can be processed and handed over as fast as possible. 

Allen Hall: Lars, that, that’s really fascinating because a lot of times when you see ultrasonic inspection, Like the data was taken two weeks ago, right?

And, and it gets sent off somewhere and you have a quote unquote expert look at it, and then engineers like me get to see that data. You’re taking that down to a much simpler process because you’re, you’re leveraging all the knowledge and experience you have and, and, and software to get. Data faster? Is that the approach?

Lars Boye Vesth: Yeah. You can actually use the data for three things. You can use it for, for a sanity check, so you can check in real time whether the data is okay. You can use it in real time to control the motion of the robot to make sure that you cover the area that you should, and then finally, of course you can, can use it to find out if there is a defect or not and how severe it 

Allen Hall: is.

This is remarkable because one of the keys for offshore wind is, Everything is so expensive, right? To get a ship out out there and people on site, the whole thing is really expensive. So time is of the essence, and if you’re gonna get on a blade, you need to be doing it the best possible way because the time on the blade, the time it took to get there is remarkably expensive.

So then this FORCE Technology and BladeBUG combination, then. Allows you to get to the site, look at the damage, and then know within a couple of minutes whether you have a problem or not. Is is, is that the approach? I mean, that’s the, 

Chris Cieslak: that’s the theory. That’s what we are aiming to get to for sure. And there’s so many benefits and upsides to that.

So I think at the beginning you mentioned that. You know, the, the surface damage doesn’t reflect the true indication of what the damage could be below the surface. And so, you know, we’ve been speaking to a lot of rope access companies today and, you know, it’s the same old story where you go to do a repair cuz it’s being categorized from a drone inspection.

And it’s always, or not always, but more often than not more severe. Than anticipated, and you mentioned it’s very expensive to be offshore the time. So if you can use that data that you’ve collected on those scans to really understand what that damage is, you can really assess how you’re going to repair that damage.

You can also then schedule how long it’s gonna take, when are you gonna do it, who’s gonna do it, have the right material. So it’s really about making sure you are minimizing any mistakes that you have when you go out to site to do any remedial work as well. So it’s that, it’s that whole package. Well, and a 

Allen Hall: good Blade scan also tells you may be able to delay when a repairer gets done also.

And that’s, I think that’s part of the difficulty today is we’re not sure how long we can delay when a repair project will begin. Right? And it, you need the first step in any good repair project is to understand the level of damage that is critical. And without having like a FORCE Technology sensor and data package behind you, you, you don’t really know.

Eyeballs. Don’t do it anymore. Yeah, it’s really 

Chris Cieslak: subjective and I think we had a good, we were chatting again to a company today and they were saying, you know how when you’ve got. 20 category five damages and you’ve only got budget to do 15, how would you know which are the 15 that you’re gonna work on? I know that sounds crazy, but that, that, that this is a real life situation that we had today.

And so this solves that problem. You can scan those damages and go, right, these are out of those severe damages already. These are the ones that are the ones you have to repair now. And so it’s, it’s a way of making sure that the right work is done at the right time and the ones that can wait can wait.

Right. 

Allen Hall: The, the key feedback that I hear all the time on. In our business is how does this change my day-to-day life? As an engineer, as a technician, what happens when I implement a BladeBUG FORCE Technology combo? You get to an answer much quicker, and then you have an idea what the, the year looks ahead of you.

Right? And it is, that makes a lot of sense. From an operator’s side, from an OEM side, is there also some information that maybe the OEMs want to know? What’s happening in service? Cause they don’t have eyes on, on, on the blades all the time either. Is, are you hearing a lot of discussion from OEMs? Like, I want to know how my blades are doing in the North Sea.

I mean, they 

Chris Cieslak: have no problems blade manufacturers, so, well, the 

Allen Hall: operators would beg to differ I think. 

Chris Cieslak: Yeah. So it’s interesting cause I mean I think fourth you do, you do work with OEMs. Obviously everyone’s sort of under the NDAs. We can’t sort of say much about it, but there is obviously interest knowing how well your, your.

Products are performing cuz you want to carry on improve. There was that DMB report that you’ve mentioned recently in one of your other podcasts and you’re not seeing that level of improvement that you should see. And I think it’s very interesting to actually start getting this data and actually really trying to improve everything from the design through to the manufacturer and, and trying to understand why you, you’re still not seeing, you know, a reduction in, in the amount of incidents that you, that you should be having with an industry, which is now not, you know, it’s not.

In, in mature industry, it’s, it should be fairly mature by now. So why, how can we, how can we use this new data to then, you know, make decisions to, to, you know, make things better in the future and reduce these chances of, of problems? 

Allen Hall: And one of the issues the operators have on the structural engineering side is that if they do do a, a drone scan, the real simple drone scan, the OEMs don’t know what to do with that data.

And I think that’s a real problem right now. If you try to go back to an oem, say, Hey, we think we have this issue. We have some drone scans. It’s sort of meaningless, right? But if you came to them with horse technology sensor data, that’s the same stuff they’re using in their own factory. It’s what the OEMs are using today.

So, Does that then open the door to having quicker discussions about how to get blades back in service? I think they 

Lars Boye Vesth: are, they’re used to, to looking at data like this. So it gives them a better understanding of what is actually what is actually wrong, what needs to be, be repaired, if any. So it’s It, it, it definitely gives them better knowledge than just having a, a drone visual inspection.

You, you ask if if this is interesting for the OEMs, and I would say that right now they’re scaling up production in a, in a, at a page that they’ve never done before. So it’s very important for them to make sure that the, that the, the, the quality is like it should be. And they’re also scaling up products.

Which causes new, new issues, challenges. So I think there’s definitely an interest for, for, from all parties. So 

Allen Hall: how soon can we see a BladeBUG FORCE Technology combo on blades? Is it ready for the summertime? It seems like everything’s pretty well 

Chris Cieslak: together. Yeah, we, we’d like to do stuff this summer.

So, you know, one of the things that we are looking for is, is getting out there and on and on turbines and, you know, start collecting that data. So we’ve got. Some, we’ve still got a bit of work to be doing, but we can do that fairly rapidly and then take it out and, and put it on some. Turbines, have you got some in-house testing still to do?

And then we’ll be looking to take it out. But ideally this summer would be the expectation. 

Lars Boye Vesth: At Force Technology, we have been doing in service inspection for more than 20 years, so we have quite a lot of experience from the field that we need to take into consideration. So that’s what we will do as well.

Now, focus on, on the. On, on the stability and, and, and the usefulness in the field, which is extremely important to make it efficient. 

Allen Hall: So every blade is built slightly differently. And the, the beauty of BladeBUG is that the adaptability of putting instrumentation in it is infinite. You can put anything in its bay and, and get it, get it to provide some answers for you.

So on different blade types and maybe different blade sizes, Lars, are, are there gonna be different kinds of sensors loaded up into the BladeBUG bay? Of course, 

Lars Boye Vesth: if we can make room for, for the two types of sensors that we’re usually using, that would be very good. But right now we will probably have two different two.

So one tool for the majority of defect types and another tool for, for a single, single defect type, which is difficult to, to find with the first tool. So, 

Allen Hall: So the, the, obviously there’s like broader damage. I know there’s like this, this little spot damage thing, like you’ve been hit by a rock or something on the, on transport.

So that takes different kinds of tools to, to detect the, the damage. Yeah. 

Lars Boye Vesth: Actually, if you, if you include transportation damage, that’s a third thing For operational issues, there are basically two different setups that we are using. But, but one is, is is more universal than the other. So and can be used for, for most things.

So we’re working on making sure that it can actually be used for, for, for all defect types. 

Allen Hall: Well, that’s the beauty of a BladeBUG as, as FORCE Technology comes up with new devices in which you clearly will because you know what the industry needs. Just go right into the BladeBUG bay and be put into service almost immediately.

That that’s, that’s genius because obviously the difficult part on offshore wind is getting technicians out there with any real ultrasonic knowledge, right? Those, those, those technicians are super expensive and there’s only a limited amount amount of them. And in the UK alone, I think there’s 11,000 offshore wind turbines headed to about 20,000.

Over the next couple of years, there’s not enough technicians to go out there and do all that, that blade damage detection, so, Now we have another tool. Right. There’s another tool in the toolbox to, to make the operator’s life easier. Yeah, 

Chris Cieslak: exactly. And, and to make more efficient use of their time and, and not send them to do unnecessary work.

Or, you know, unexpected work. So that’s, you know, one of the key challenges I think you’ve mentioned previously, and we’ve heard it numerous times today, it is lack of, of these technicians who can do not only just the inspection, but also the remedial work as well. And so really trying to be an efficient and how you use them.

That’s key. So if the robot can free up their time to do that work, which has to be done by a person, then that’s saving them from doing another job unnecessarily. So it’s one of the key areas that we can do to help with that sort of shortage of, of skilled technical people. 

Allen Hall: Lars Force Technology, huge company.

How do people find you? For all the things that you do? We have, 

Lars Boye Vesth: Wind energy website so forcetechnology.com/wind energy where it. Where you can find all, all the information about the products and services we are offering the win industry. And we will have some some specific information about this collaboration as well.

Oh, 

Allen Hall: nice. And Chris, where can people find out about Blade Bug? 

Chris Cieslak: Bladebug.co.uk or LinkedIn’s another really good place. So we, we keep posting regularly, so if you put BladeBug into LinkedIn, you’ll, you’ll come across me or Stacey, our business development managers, just sign it over there and or we’ve got our own page as well.

So yeah, we we’re easy to find and we’ll be promoting this, this collaboration. So yeah keep an eye out for it. But yeah, it’s a really exciting collaboration between us and, and force, which are yeah, you know, leading this wind turbine inspection. It’s 

Allen Hall: fantastic. It is a great collaboration and thank you for announcing it on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

We appreciate having both of you on. And, and Chris and Lars, thank you so much.