Wind turbine composite blades can cleverly conceal damage beneath the paint, evading detection by drone inspections. Enter BladeBUG: equipped with ultrasound sensors, this innovative robot uncovers hidden faults lurking within the blade. In an exclusive interview at WindEurope 2023 in Copenhagen, Denmark, Allen and Joel engage with Chris Cieslak, the Director of BladeBUG, to delve into the world of BladeBUG.

PowerCurve – https://powercurve.dk
Pardalote Consulting at https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Wind Power Lab – https://windpowerlab.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

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Bladebug

Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, where we feature the latest advancements in wind energy technology. I’m your host, Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, along with my co-host Joel Saxum vice President of North American Sales for Wind Power LAB and we are here at Wind Europe 2023 in Copenhagen.

Denmark and we are fortunate to, fortunate to have with us Chris Che, the director at Blade Bug, to give us an update on all things Blade bug. Chris, welcome back to 

Chris Cieslak: Thanks very much. I thought fortunate it’s the right word, but yeah, pleasure to be back here. I’m very fortunate to be here. 

Allen Hall: Yeah, thank you.

Yeah, so there’s a lot has happened since we have spoken to you last, you’ve been a frequent guest on, on the podcast. Thank goodness. I’m glad to have you, but, Yeah, blade Bugs made a number of improvements. Since the last time we’ve seen you, we, we saw you last in Hamburg, Germany. You wanna give us an update on things that are happening?

Yeah, 

Chris Cieslak: so when we last spoke in Hamburg, we were presenting our robot and we’ve been developing and refining our ultrasonic non-destructive testing capabilities on blades. And so we’ve spent a couple of, we spent winters basically hunker down refining a couple of different OEM systems in our.

Platform. So our robotic platform, we’ve got a, a form of ultrasonic inspection using a, a technology called like four Matrixx capture, which is really interesting. It gives a, a very nice visual indication of, of defects and composites. And then we’re also using a more classical ut approach of phased array.

Okay. Which gives us, you know, a very consistent approach of inspecting composition that’s been used for 20, 30 years. So 

Allen Hall: why one 

Chris Cieslak: over the other? Because I think it’s, there’s, there isn’t one shoe that fits all. So it’s a case of the ability or the beauty of having a platform such as Blade Bug is you can have a solution, be it with different equipment to overcome a challenge that you’re looking for on a blade.

Yeah. So if you have a particular issue on a blade in a certain location, it might be that laminate is too thick for the frequency of the probe of one type of equipment. You can change it to your other Thing and go, right, this is, yeah. For this particular area for, for this particular inspection task, I can use this equipment.

And for the other one it’s, it’s that, so okay. It’s about having the flexibility to ensure that you can do the job at hand essentially. Right? Yeah. For those 

Joel Saxum: who don’t know blades that well, I mean, you can be in the root section and you can have four inches of, of material. Yeah. You can go out to the tip and you can be down to a quarter inch.

Yeah. Right. So having the right tool for the right job gotta have 

Chris Cieslak: it. Exactly. And again, you have different parts of the blade, which is just. Monolithic like laminate structures, but then you have sandwich panels as well. And being able to understand, you know, those different challenges and having different solutions to understand what’s going on that you can’t see from just vision inspections really port.

So the 

Allen Hall: Blade bug platform is host to this ultrasonic testing instrument. Yep. Right. So just, just plug right into the, to the belly of the beast. Exactly. 

Chris Cieslak: Yeah. Okay. So we have, so the, the, the blade bug is a, a platform where we have a belly. Like a payload bay that we can Okay. Interchange different tools in.

So the robot gobbles them up. And we essentially, the clever thing about Blade Bug is, is our ability to manipulate tools over the surface without additional equipment. So it is this really a case of we have six robot arms controlling the body. So we’ve got very precise CNC control over our system.

And what that means is we can do a task which is really repetitive. So if you wanted to scan an area, We can program that path into the robot, press a button and it will just follow that path time and time again. And so it removes that variation that you might get. If you’re a person danging from a rope on a blade, you know you’re trying to do this, no feedback, you don’t get quite good scan, right?

For us, it’s really about making a consistent path. But that means you get consistent data. And so if you have, if you wanted to do a an inspection campaign over a number of blades, you can be confident that. You can compare like for like, for like, because you know that that is precise and you haven’t, you know, sure.

You’re in the same location, it’s the same path, it’s the same parameters that you’ve used and all those things, and you get a much, you know, it just, again, it’s the quality of the data that you have that you can make those assessments and decisions about what you do next. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah. We were in the booth next door just a little bit ago.

I was talking with Chris about some stuff with Wind power lab, possibly, and seeing the, some of the videos you have of the robot operating. Where the actual N d t head is making contact with the blade and the blade engineers in the background, kind of, kind of messing with the robot, not the robot itself, but the blade piece.

Trying to set show. This could be the movement when you’re up tower, if you’ve ever been up tower as a technician, of course, you know, when you’re on ropes, if you’re up there in an eight, 10 meter wind, you’re moving all around that blade tip is, is swinging a, it could swing a meter. Mm-hmm. Right. So the video that Chris showed me that the, there’s a pressure sensor on the backside of the N D T probe, so that is making consistent pressure, consistent contact.

With a coup delivery system. If you could, if you’ve know anything about ndt, of course you need that to get really good results all the time. Not alone, let alone the positional accuracy of, of repeatability. But actually the, the testing itself, you know, when you’re pushing on whether it’s a metal coupon or if it’s a composite or whatever, you’re ndt the coupling is the, if that doesn’t happen right, nothing works.

Right. Right. You get no data. Right. So they have cleverly developed the control system within the robot to keep. That probe right on the the subject matter that it needs to 

Chris Cieslak: scan. So yeah, kudos. And this is really about just refining that process, which is what it is. And it’s a case of, you know, we’ve had all of winter when inspections can’t be done cause of the weather Yeah.

To really refine it. And so now we are going out in the field looking for clients, you know, really validating the system. So the difference that we had in in Hamburg we’re like, oh, you know, we’re not ready yet. But that’s what we’ve done over winter. We’ve got ready, we’ve got two systems ready to go out there.

So we are ready to go out to the field and do this high value. Oxon inspection to look for defects beneath the surface. And again, it’s so complimentary to like the drone inspections out there. If you see some defects, heaven forbid, there might be some cereal defects in blades that might lead. Looking at, you know, we can go to those areas and have a very consistent approach to how we, we look for those.

So then if, 

Allen Hall: if, if Wedberg has been deployed to look for like a serial defect, then the accuracy becomes super important because those serial defects tend to happen. Relatively in the same area, right? Mm-hmm. So you want to be able to have some exact location. So Blake Book can actually get you to that exact location.

Yeah. And, and have repeatable data. Now you’ve been doing some work in France and, and I think I saw that on your LinkedIn post, if I’m speaking 

Chris Cieslak: outta That was last. Yeah, that was last August or June we did that. Yeah, 

Allen Hall: it was, it was last summer, right? Yeah. So what have you learned from that? Campaign from France and, and what, what do you take into this upcoming spring in terms of knowledge?

Chris Cieslak: So I think the thing we learned from that is it is firstly challenging to get equipment from the UK into Europe. But that aside we learned a lot. So that was a, that was almost like a baptism of fire, you know, that was one of the biggest offshore turbines or onshore turbines. We were on bigger offshore turbines, but, That was a nine meter hub height, sort of understanding the challenges of how to get on that blade.

But what we were able to do is do a scan 80 meters from the ground in a particular area where we know there was a a potential serial defect. And what that really showed us was two things. One, we can do it. Two, there is refinement and improvements can make on getting the blade bug onto that position.

And two, it really validated that we can have an NDT composites expert. Be on hand, albeit 600 kilometers away. So they can dial in remotely, they can look at that data, they can influence how those settings and parameters are done to ensure that you get good data. So one of the challenges that I think NDT in general has is that there’s not many skilled people who can do it.

There’s fewer who can do that on ropes who like to do lot of ropes. And so this is about really democratizing that NDT capability and using the expertise, but they can be in the comfort of their own office and home and, and, and sort of analyze that data and really, You know, open up ndt, which is kind of, it’s still a bit of like a, oh, that’s like a bit specialist for me.

It’s like, well no, it is specialist because there’s not many people can do it, but we are opening the door. Sudan. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah. You know, at the beginning of the conversation we talked a little bit about a couple of different methodologies that you guys were using. Mm-hmm. What are some of the new stuff that you’re working on?

Chris Cieslak: So there’s really interesting new technology that uses a different form of non-destructive testing, not ultrasound. And that enables us to check the defects and damages in, in sandwich panel areas of blades, which is an area which you can’t use ultrasound because the sound gets, there’s air in it essentially, and the sound can’t penetrate.

So we are using technology that’s been proven on fiberglass boats where you have really thick, not necessarily best quality laminates, right, but you can clearly see areas of where there’s delamination. You can clearly see things like the rib and spa structure of, of those boats. And that’s a really interesting new bit of technology, which again, is another complimentary capability that we’ll have alongside the ndt.

So it’s not just the monolithic areas. We can look for defects in the composites on the inner surface that you cannot do with any other form at the moment. 

Joel Saxum: That’s huge 

Allen Hall: for the industry. Yeah. And what’s the magic there? 

Chris Cieslak: The magic. So again, we are not, we are not the magic source of what that technology. So it’s, it’s essentially tapping.

But it’s, it’s a much clever, it’s a much cleverer approach than just your, your. Traditional tap testing approach. So, 

Joel Saxum: so you could go, like, you could go like a, so it’s got an old score, but new score? Yes. Yeah. So like the technician uses a quarter, right? Yeah. It’s like ping, right? The technician could hear it, but they’re not really sure what’s going on.

They’re not sure what’s going on. They know there’s something, but they’re not sure. Yeah. But now they’ve put smarts to it and they can, they can see it and 

Chris Cieslak: you can map it. So you can end up with like heat maps of, of areas of composites and identify very clearly where defects are. So it’s, again, it’s just building up that essentially arsenal of tools.

That solves problems. So is this this real platform approach where we have this armory of equipment that we can go right, for this equip for this inspection, we need this equipment because it’s, it’s here. We know that that structure’s gonna be whatever 

Allen Hall: it’s Right. Okay. So that’s an innovative approach.

Mm-hmm. I I, I know there’s not a lot of N D T testing in situ. Yeah. Yeah. Because it’s so dang hard to do it. Yeah. And particularly if it’s raining. Yeah. Yeah. It’s windy. It’s hard to do it. So, and this may be the real first opportunity where NTT happens on the blade, particularly offshore, where it’s gonna be a problem.

Now we can actually diagnose what’s happening instead of decommissioning, which is what happens a lot of just, they just turn the turine off until they can figure out what’s going on. You can actually get in there, figure it out. And Is it okay? Yeah. Call wind power lab. Turn. See if you can turn it back on again.

Well, I’m thinking 

Joel Saxum: about use cases for the technology as it grows, as you guys scale. Mm-hmm. End of life extension. Oh, yeah. Right. Because right now it’s like, well, you know, it’s been up there for 20 years. We’re not really sure right now. You would have the capability to check the spar caps. Yep. Make sure there’s no, the, the, you know, no delaminations happening.

Right. Check, check the trailing edge, make sure that they’re not starting to split and all that stuff that you can’t see visually. Mm-hmm. But then you could have a level of comfortableness where you could sleep well at night knowing that there’s, those blades are still out there running. Yeah. But you’ve checked those you know, key areas.

Chris Cieslak: Yeah. And at the same time, end of warranty, you know? Yeah. When you head over, it’s like the OEMs just like, they’re yours now. They’re done. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. They’re done. So yeah, you can actually be confident that what you’re taking on is in good health. Yep. So what does a summer 

Allen Hall: look like?

Chris Cieslak: The summer looks like wind power labs finally giving us some work place we hope.

Yep. Yeah, so it’s, it’s really about getting it out there, getting a lot more validation of the system. Pilot commercial work with, with end users. Thanks. Really for us, we just wanna get on as many turbines, different sizes, different types as possible. And that for us is, is our challenge. And that’s what we are, we’re, we’ve built up to do over winter, get prepared for this, this season and do that in parallel.

We are, we are currently raising so it’s a startup that’s pre-commercial. We need to fund what we’re doing. Sure. So we’ve been raising now we would due to close end of July, end of June. So we’ve got some good progress, but. The world seems to have changed over the last sort of six months and investing in tech, investing in startups is, is, is hard graph.

So I’ve been distracted a lot with, with investment. It’s, it’s going okay. It’s going well, but it’s definitely something I just want to like, close the lid on and just crack on with what we’re doing because we’ve got a limited season and I just want to get on and, and do it. Yeah, but you, 

Allen Hall: you can’t ignore I think every innovative company that’s here.

Is doing two things simultaneously. They’re fundraising and there’s development in technology. Yeah. Improving it out and, and so the proving out part you’ve been working really hard on. Yeah. And now it’s when you, you, you need to go, right? Yeah. And you need, you need funding to, to get to that sort of next stage where you’re deploying Blade Bug around the world that takes funding to do that.

There are, are still, I think there’s still a lot of opportunities, but I, I think you’re echoing a lot of what I hear from around the industry is there’s a lot of talk about renewable energy and there’s a lot of talk about investment in that, but not necessarily in the technologies that will create renewable energy.

Yeah. Because you, you need to be not necessarily investing in software all what’s Yes. Which is where we see a lot of software in ai. Yeah. Because it’s an easy investment that can see the, it’s a faster ramp up. Mm-hmm. But the reality is if the wind turbines aren’t running, we’re not helping ourselves.

And it takes tools like Blade Book to, to make that happen. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah. And the last few years, of course, COVID derailed the financial industry. Sure, sure. But now with interest rates high all over the world VC funding, banks failing. Yeah. It’s, yeah. Silicon Valley Bank. Yeah. V you know, VC funding and PE funding is, it’s tough to come by because the, that active capital out there is a little bit more 

Chris Cieslak: leery.

Everyone’s a lot more risk averse Yeah. Than you know. Yeah. In reality, we’re, we’re developing new tech. It, it’s, yeah, it’s risky, but, you know, we are confident. In what we’re doing. You’ve seen the videos of what we can do. Yeah. So we just wanna crack on and, and, and get on with that, but, right. Yeah. It’s a, it’s a bit more of a slog than I had a It’s not 

Joel Saxum: easy being a founder.

No, 

Chris Cieslak: no, no. It wasn’t great when you didn’t expect that you, you wouldn to build a robot. Let’s, 

Joel Saxum: let’s go make a robot 

Chris Cieslak: and get it to work. Yeah. They will come though. People will be knocking our daughter. Yeah. And again, it’s, it’s, they are coming. They are coming. That’s true. Yeah. But it is definitely you know, when you look back, it’s like, okay.

I wish, I not wish I’d done things slightly differently, but you definitely learned from this journey as being a founder. For sure. 

Allen Hall: We, you have to change with the changing times, right? I, I, I think we’re a similar company. We we’re in the lightning space, here’re in the robot space. Yeah. But we did years and years and years of grinding away, grinding away till we got to a product.

Then we had to find the customers and develop that base. Right? Yeah. That’s normal. It’s painful. But I’d rather see a company go through what you’re going through than one that has the quote unquote rapid success. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because when that gets out and deployed in the field, that’s when those companies have trouble.

Spend the time, do the work, get the company founded. Right. Get, get your financials right and then go do Yeah. Go do the world. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And that, that’s, I think you’re taking the right approach here. Cause we, we talk to companies, Joel and I talk to companies every day that, that are trying to find the quick path.

Yeah. And I. I always worry is this, is this helping renewable energy or, or is it hurting it? Mm-hmm. I think a lot of times it’s hurting it. I’d rather see longer developed timeframes. I like to see bigger companies come back in like a vestus, which is doing some investing in companies, which is fantastic.

GEs doing that. So there’s a number of large OEMs investing in companies like Cuz they see the future. Yeah. And they know they need that. That’s it To be successful. 

Joel Saxum: The closer we get to, like Allen and I, he said he’s a lot of conversations with a lot of startups. A lot of, oh yeah. A lot of innovative companies.

The closer you get to the VC and the PE space, sometimes you meet people, A lot of times you meet people that’s kind of like, gives you a sinking feeling where they’re playing a financial game. Yeah. Rather than producing a solution. Right. Right. There it’s a solution. Failed as a get rich quick scheme sometimes.

Yeah. And you’re like, man, you know, we’d really like to see more solutions out there that can help the industry rather than just someone over here trying to make money. Mm-hmm. And I think that you guys, like Allen said, the approach you’re taking and the product that you’ve got, there’s a real chance that you can add to the industry, right?

There’s, there’s a shortage of technicians we already know. Mm-hmm. There’s a huge, there’s a short, there’s a shortage of NDT people in the world. So compare that and someone that can go up tower and do it, you’re, you’re in a tough position to find people. You’re enabling. The wind industry to do that MDT up tower with robotics.

It’s it’s a novel approach. Mm-hmm. And I think there’s gonna be some success. 

Chris Cieslak: Success. Yeah. No, I’m, again, it comes from what we originally set out to do, which is make wind turbines better. Yeah. And that’s still the focus. That’s still the drive. You know, it’s, it’s, this is a, this is one part of what Play Park can do to make that, but it is that whole ethos of we can make win better.

Yeah. Yeah. So, if. 

Allen Hall: Exactly. Everybody listening out there and, and we’ve had Joel, I, I don’t know how many times have been stopped in the last two days here. Like you’re the guy with the podcast. Yes, yes, I can. So if, and there’s a lot of operators here. So if an operator wanted to reach out to Blade Bug, how do they find you?

How do they connect with you? 

Chris Cieslak: Yeah, so website which is getting revamped imminently actually. 

Allen Hall: Which is really, yeah, yeah, yeah. I love your site. It’s like one of the best websites. It’s more renewable energy product that 

Chris Cieslak: I’ve seen. It’s okay. It’s just gonna refresh. So we’re gonna a bit uhhuh a bit of an update because that has purposely been kind of left updated for a bit of a while.

So it’s just a bit more information about what we do with the NDT and, and updates on that. But a bit of a refresh on like the logo Yeah. And stuff like that to give us a bit of a, now we are going into this commercial world, let’s like, let’s, you know, let’s launch and, and do things in a nice way. So we’re working on that.

LinkedIn, if you look at Blade Pub, we’ve got quite a good following now on LinkedIn, on on Blade Bug, but course myself, Chris Che Hacker or Chris at Blade Bug dot code UK is a, a way of getting contact. We have invested Blade Bug if you’re interested in investing as well. So it’s there’s lots of ways you can find us.

We, we’ve, you know, if you type blade bug in, we appear. We’re quite that. 

Allen Hall: Well Chris, it’s great to see you in Copenhagen and we love having you back so well, we should touch again after the summer. I would like to see how your summer went and hear what’s next for blink up. 

Chris Cieslak: Definitely. Thank you once again for having me on the show.

It’s yeah, it’s great and I listen every week I do generally 

Joel Saxum: more of those, more of those.