SOCOBLADE Protects Against Leading Edge Erosion

Max Le Tallec from SOCOMORE speaks about their new SOCOBLADE
product, in partnership with Hontek. The product was originally
created to protect military helicopters, and is now an LEP solution
that reduces downtime, maintenance costs, and power losses. Sign up
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wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard
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YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the
show? Email us! Allen Hall: Imagine spending half a million
dollars on leading edge repairs only to watch them fail again in
just 18 months. That's the reality many wind operators face today.
This week on the Uptime Spotlight, Max Le Tallec joins us from
Socomore to discuss how helicopter technology designed to withstand
combat conditions is now protecting wind turbine blades. The wait
for a military grade leading edge solution is finally over. Welcome
to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind Energy's brightest
innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall:
Max, welcome to the program. Maxime Le Tallec: Thank you. Thanks
for welcoming me. Allen Hall: I think we're gonna talk leading edge
erosion and what to do about it. I want to back up a little bit
because there's a lot of operators with a lot of leading edge
erosion. Why should they care about the leading edge erosion? Why
does that matter? Maxime Le Tallec: The, we've seen the blade today
been eroded, almost destroyed with holes of the size [00:01:00] of
a fist which. Create issues on the aerodynamics of the blade and
the downtime and major repairs or major downtimes on the blade.
Allen Hall: Yeah. And that turns into a lot of expensive repairs,
obviously. And we're also hearing from a lot of operators about the
power. Loss of you hear numbers from anywhere from a fraction of a
percent to somewhere north of three 4%. Are you hearing those same
sort of things? Just the power loss gets to be so expensive. Maxime
Le Tallec: Yes. And even up to five certain are saying so that's
why you need to be preventive on this aspect and actually not to
wait for the damage to come on the plate. Joel Saxum: I think that
when we talk a EP loss, it's exacerbated even more in the market
nowadays when we're starting to look at these 5.5, 6.1, 6.8, and
I'm just talking about onshore turbines, these big megawatt
turbines. If you're losing 1% from that big turbine, that's a lot
more than it would've been, 10, 15 years ago on a GE 1.5, or you're
not lo, you're [00:02:00] losing, but 1% doesn't hurt you as much.
But when you start talking these big, long blades, like everybody
has to have a leading edge, erosion, leading edge. Protection
strategy in place to make sure that they don't get to that point
where they have big repairs or they're losing a bunch of
production. Are you, are operators engaging with you guys now with
your with the new product? Socoblade? Maxime Le Tallec: Yes. A lot
of companies, so our product today has been on the market for a
while. This is the non-tech technology, which actually we scale up
today. So we've worked for more than a year now with Ontech to
scale up the manufacturing, to make the product available
worldwide. So the product is pretty well known already in North
America and the world spread farms to farms. Now with our
headquarter in Europe and our local forces we are reaching more and
more European farms as well. We've seen a very high interest back
in December during a Dusseldorf show. The everyone is coming. Yes.
Allen Hall: Yeah. That's unique. [00:03:00] So Hontek has developed
a leading edge erosion, preventive coating that came from the
military and on helicopters originally. And that technology has now
evolved quite a bit. Into, and a product that can be made for wind
turbine blades. And the problem with Hontek was, or originally, is
that there was so much demand for the product that it got really
difficult to get in line to get enough of it to do your wind farm,
and particularly in Europe because the Americans would use it up
most quickly. So bringing smore into this equation does. Greatly
improved the likelihood of putting this Hontek product on. Now,
obviously, so Sommore is a great chemical company. That's what you
are. You have all kinds of technologies for a variety of
industries, including aerospace, which is where I first ran across
Sommore. But this Hontek collaboration opens up a number of
[00:04:00] doors for smore to really help the wind operator,
correct? Maxime Le Tallec: Yes, of course. We, the product today is
designed to be rolled on damaged turbine or as a preventative
leading edge protection. But now thanks to our collaboration, we're
freeing ontech to keep developing new solution and adapt to the new
challenges that the farms are meeting. The product that we have
today, as we were seeing is actually the result of 30 years of
development BioNTech. So they come from far and they tremendously.
Analyze and develop the product to meet the exact field need. Allen
Hall: And that's huge, right? That, that the product has so much
service history that in aerospace and now on wind turbines and the
word of mouth spread very quickly that service history is something
that smore is using. To to explore other markets with and to grow
the wind base. That is really critical because I think when you see
a lot of new leading edge erosion [00:05:00] products pop up, they
have maybe six months of service life at best, or it's a brand new
product for a 2025. Okay, great, but what am I gonna spend a
hundred K, 200 K, 500 k putting this on my turbines when it don't
and have a lot of history. Samore provides all that. All that data,
all that history with this product. And can you explain like all
the effort that went into this product to get to here? Maxime Le
Tallec: So as you were saying, the backbone of the chemistry is
coming or has been used by the military in the past. And over the
past years, the product has been challenged against different
aerospace testing, military testing so under way more severe.
Conditions that the wind tests are currently with tremendous
results. So that's where we are always pushing the limit higher and
higher. Joel Saxum: You know, as Alan and I, of course we're
talking with operators all the time and ISPs across the wind space
and globally really. [00:06:00] But a lot of people in the US. You
talk, you mention the word Hantek and Ooh, that stuff's good. Ooh,
that stuff's good. But as we all know, if you've been in wind or if
you've been around blades at all, a product that's installed on a
blade is only as good as its installation. Can you tell us a little
bit about how you guys install this or how the Hontek stuff is
applied and it doesn't have to be versus other part products in the
market? Just how is it applied? So we're making life easy on a
technician so they get a good end product, one particular of our
products. Maxime Le Tallec: So that's a two component products. We
need to warm one of the part for preparation is one of the
specificity. We recommend some equipment that can be used actually
at the back of a truck. So no matter where the turbine, we can
actually prepare the solution. Then pouring the part A in the Part
B, you get your can. Ready to go, and that's a rollable solution.
So you have your roller. The product has been designed for the, I
would say, the most complicated application for ropers. And the
rollable application is [00:07:00] actually very forgiving. So no
matter if you splash a bit, if you swing a bit on the blade you can
easily correct the application and make it clean and lean all along
the leading edge. We've designed the kit just to cover one blade at
a time. So everything has been thought for the epi for the
operator. Sorry. To be easy for the application. Allen Hall: Oh,
that's so critical, right? Because you don't wanna mix a bunch of
the product together and have to paint three turbines at a time.
You want to do it one blade at a time, and obviously soccer more.
Is really good at packaging and making this simple for the
technician on site. Now, there are really two different versions of
the same product. You want to de describe what those differences
are? Maxime Le Tallec: Yeah, so we talk about LEP two 20 and LEP
two 20 age. The two 20 has been developed for dri drier
environment, more cheek, so low humidity. Where the 2 23 8 has a
way wider conditions, window of application from [00:08:00] 35 to
95 relative humidity. So the technology of the product is moisture
secure, so it will actually cure with the ambient moisture in the
air. Allen Hall: So it's sim it's similar to a superglue, right?
Superglue cures with humidity in the air. And so you need a little
bit of humidity to make this work. However, if you look at other
products, I think this is why the Hontek product is so well loved,
is that. You could be in dry Texas, New Mexico, places that are hot
and pretty dry, and you can apply it. You can apply it offshore
where the humidity is exactly 95%. And how do you do that? A lot of
other products don't have that variability or they have trouble in
there. They don't cure up. Quite as nice. The Huntec product
basically removes all those barriers. Max, you have this mixture.
It does magic. It's applied generally with rollers. I thought I
have seen it applied with different methods though. Are there other
ways to apply it beyond roller? Maxime Le Tallec: So there is
[00:09:00] a brushable application possible as well and we are
customizing the product to be applicable through robot. We've seen
more and more robot application nowadays. And we want to make sure
to, that's.