Nicholas Gaudern, CTO of Power Curve, joined the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast to discuss his company's performance upgrades for wind turbines. After analyzing a blade using a laser scan, Power Curve recommends an ideal placement of either vortex generators, gurney flaps, trailing edge serrations (or a combination of all three). Mr. Gaudern shares his view of the performance upgrade market and where he sees the industry going as wind farm operators fight to increase Annual Energy Production (AEP) and prevent performance degradation over time from leading edge erosion, dirt, blade misalignment and more. Check out their YouTube channel for more.

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EP44 - Nicholas Gaudern, CTO of Power Curve, Explains Blade Aerodynamics & Power Curve Upgrades

Welcome back to the uptime podcast. I'm your co-host Dan Blewett on today's episode. We have a great guest. NicholasGaudern,  CTO of Power Curve is here. And we had a really fantastic conversation, all about a wind turbine, power curve, upgrades, blade, aerodynamics, all that good stuff. So, Allen, I'll kick this off to you.

What were some of your takeaways from our conversation with Nick? Well, I was shocked.

Allen Hall: [00:01:08] And how much performance improvement that a power curve can offer to existing blaze that that even have damage to them. So leading edge erosion damage, uh, hail, whatever, they can basically eliminate the, the additional dragon power curve loss by the addition.

Of, uh, vortex generators, gurney flaps, um, and bring back that power and make the blade somewhat insensitive to a lot of the dirt and contamination and issues that happen typically on winter.

Dan: [00:01:41] Yeah, it was a really interesting conversation. I think it, uh, I think it really demystified. A lot of the air dynamics stuff, especially which can get pretty complex, uh, regarding, you know, air flow over wind turbine blades.

And it's not a

Allen Hall: [00:01:52] one stop fix. They are tailoring the aerodynamic improvements and modifications to the sites particular. A wind turbine manufacturer and blade style, and what would be happening on those blades at this particular moment? So it's, it's not, VGs everywhere. It is selective use of the proper solution to improve those particular turbines.

And they go through this comparative phase where they upgrade. One turbine next to another turbine and show that the power curve increase, the AEP has gone up and they can actually monitor that.