This week on Power-Up, we discuss Ventus Engineering’s monitoring system which improves power production, GE’s system for finding broken blade heating systems, and Vestas’s lifetime extension strategy. Plus an interesting approach to diet control…

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Allen Hall: Welcome to Power Up, the Uptime podcast focused on the new, hot off the press technology that can change the world. Follow along with me, Allen Hall, and Innosaur’s Phil Totaro, as we discuss the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will charge your energy future.

Hey Phil, we got Joel Saxum here for our look at some really interesting wind ideas. And the first one is from Ventus Engineering. And it has to do with a monitoring system for wind turbines, which uses multiple data streams and looking at generator power output, mechanical measurements, torque, cell direction, and some meteorological conditions.

And this is all processed real time using a computer to then assess where the rotor and the blade should be. to improve power production and the condition of the tower. So it’s usually a combination of, from what I can tell, SCADA, LiDAR, and a lookup camera to watch the rotor essentially. And, and Phil, when I reviewed this patent, I thought, man, that seems pretty complicated to, to do this.

Is this. Is this idea going to move forward, do you think?

Philip Totaro: This, so this company that’s developed this concept they are trying to commercialize it, and they, the real interesting thing about this, and the reason I wanted to talk about it on the show was, the, this combination of the lookup camera combined with SCADA data and LIDAR is, is a little unique, so the lookup camera idea for helping to improve rotor imbalance or, or pitch calibration issues that’s been done for, I don’t know, about 12 or 13 years now in the industry.

Obviously using a nacelle mounted lidar is not a new idea and, and certainly SCADA data monitoring, not a new idea either, but the combination of all those, I don’t think has actually been done before in this kind of specific implementation where. They are intentionally trying to visualize any kind of issues that might cause these kinds of imbalances that would impact adversely impact performance.

So this is a, it’s potentially complicated, but it’s also a level of sophistication that the industry is now capable of, of implementing because we’ve got a reasonable degree of maturity with all those three different concepts. So again, the skated data, the LIDAR system and the lookup camera. So Joel, I, what, what do you think about the commercial viability of this?

Joel Saxum: So this to me is a CMS system on steroids that has multiple sensors and can give the operator more data. So I think that there is a, there’s definitely a possibility for back office engineers and people that are responsible for the operation of these turbines, a safe operation and efficient operation of turbines to use something like this.

Allen Hall: Our next idea comes from Stefan Klumper for General Electric over in Spain. And it deals with failures in the blade heating elements. And the one thing we know about blade heating elements is they like to break. And when they break, they can become very difficult to detect where that break occurs. So what.

This concept is, is they’re looking for that failure location, identifying it using electrical means by applying a voltage and looking for some leakage currents and then changes in capacitance, which will tell you that the system has degraded in some means. But then also using a method of sending voltage impulses Down the heating system and then timing those pulses when those pulses get reflected back as to where on the blade this damage may occur and this concept, Bill, has been used in lightning lightning protection systems for brakes and lightning protection systems, but this makes a little more sense to me.

Using it for heaters.

Philip Totaro: Yeah. And just to be clear, what this idea is around is for the ice protection technology, usually they have some kind of heating elements located on the leading edge or potentially other to a smaller degree, other sections of the blade that are, that are going to be prone to icing.

But you know, the reason why we are tracking this at Intel store is as part of our, IP prism capability. We like to be able to try to identify. Clever ideas that we think are going to not necessarily in this case, like be game changing, but something that will definitely make the lives of people owning and operating wind turbines easier.

I think this falls into that category because you’re, you’re talking about having that detection capability where if you find that there’s a fault, You don’t have to go through and strip off the entire heating element off the blade and then reapply it later. You can just go find and localize where that fault is and make your repairs a lot more cost and time efficient.

So I think this is a really clever one.

Joel Saxum: It’s reducing technician time in the field because these things are hard enough to repair when you get to them, but you got to find it. And now with longer blades and longer blades, if you’re talking some of the newest heating systems going up in the Nordic country on 70 and 80 meter long blades.

It could take a team of technicians, or a couple guys on ropes, or whatever it may be, a long, a day to find the break, or two days to find the break. And then you got to dig into the repair and the repair is enough of a pain. So, when you’re dealing with something like this, making field operations more efficient, absolutely makes sense to me.

Allen Hall: Next idea is from Siemens Gamesa and it has to do with lifetimes of wind turbines and trying to keep the whole farm operating until the end of life. And Phil, this is a really interesting concept just because it looks at the wind farm in total and the operational. Performance of the whole farm by controlling the upstream turbines and their effect on the downstream turbines.

Downstream turbines can see a lot of turbulence, obviously, so they tend to get a little, have a little bit of a rougher life. And what this patent is trying to address is that lifespan. Could they organize the wind farm? In a way that extends to life. This is interesting.

Philip Totaro: So what they’re doing with this concept is they’re looking at the amount of residual life and the expected annual energy production of individual turbines.

And then they’re trying to develop a park level control system that will allow all turbines in the park to have the maximum park level output between whatever today is in the expected end of life of, of the asset. So this gives them a lot more flexibility and control over. How to optimize power production how to potentially optimize pitch control algorithms and things like that that could have an impact on the downwind turbines, yaw control algorithms and, and wake steering that, that could be anything that might adversely impact the, the lifetime or lifespan of the, the downwind turbines.

So this is, this is very clever it’s one of, it’s not necessarily the first time that somebody’s tried to come up with like a park level optimization, but it’s, it’s a very clever way of thinking, and I, I particularly like this for the, the style of problem solving that the the engineers behind this at Siemens Gamesa have, have employed.

Allen Hall: Well, in our most intriguing idea of the week Lucy Barnby, who is an individual inventor, has a patent that proposes a unique anti eating device. It’s a face mask, and it’s used for diet control. And it has, if you can envision this, a rigid sort of cup shaped cover that goes over your mouth and chin, kind of like a muzzle, Bill.

And then it attaches to your head with some straps, and it has a lock. So this is, this is kind of a stream. I haven’t seen this in service anywhere, obviously, but It has holes for breathing, thank goodness, right? And, but on top of this, there has to be an emergency release mechanism, right? I mean, you have to…

Philip Totaro: Well, you know what, Allen?

Sometimes people need a little extra level of control. And so, by the way, for anyone in the audience wondering why we’re talking about this kind of thing, what we want to be able to do is, is cover a few of the kind of wacky ideas out there that that people have had. So this is definitely towards the top of the list.

You’ll remember if you were with us for our first episode, we talked about a motorized ice cream cone. This one’s probably up there is amongst people in the patent world as, as one of their favorite wackiest ideas. And you know what, it, if you are familiar with this, this patent at all, or, we’re going to show you the some of the images of it.

You, you’ll get the idea pretty quick and again, I think it was designed at a, in a time when people were potentially a little less sensitive about how to best control overeating.

Joel Saxum: There’s apps out there that will control your eating. There’s other things that, but it all boils down to like Phil said, self control.

My best trick is to have a better half who loves me and cares about my health instead of having a basically chastity belt, but for my waistline.