Siemens Gamesa De-Icing, Vestas Permanent Tower Crane

We discuss Siemens Gamesa's advanced blade de-icing system, their
blade root repair fix, and a tower designed by Vestas with its own
permanent crane system. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and
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YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the
show? Email us! Phil Totaro: This is Power Up, where
groundbreaking wind energy ideas become your clean energy future.
Here's your hosts, Allen Hall and Phil Totaro. Allen Hall: We have
really interesting patents this week, Phil, including this first
one from Siemens Gamesa, and it is a wind turbine blade with an
advanced de icing system. Now, you say to yourself, well, there's
been a lot of de icing systems on wind turbine blades. In fact,
Rosie has worked on a number of them for LM. But this one's a
little bit different. So it It uses a kind of a matrix setup of
thermal heating areas arranged in sort of series and parallel
connections, and it creates overlapping heating zones that can be
very precisely controlled. Now that is very beneficial because a
lot of times you More temperature, more heat towards the tip than
you do at the root. So you would like the temperature to be graded
up towards the tip. It's kind of hard to do a lot of times. But in
this situation, you can adapt it to the situation. And this seems
smart, but I haven't seen it implemented. And I know Siemens Gamesa
owners. Like the icing system. So maybe this is coming out in the
near future, Phil. Phil Totaro: Yeah, this would be interesting
because this is very different than your conventional like blown
air solution, like Enercon and other companies use. Where you could
have a scenario where you've got like hotspots and, and heat
concentrations at different points along the blades, particularly
where you have ribs or bulkheads or something that would kind of
get in the way of the airflow. a thermal heating mat with again,
different zones where you can kind of trigger, on off to, to try
and either prevent ice accretion or actually provide deicing for
the blade. So it's, it's a really interesting approach in that it
gives you more granular control over where you want to be able to,
to de ice and again, based on ice thickness, and you can, monitor
your Phil Totaro: performance, or you might have a more
sophisticated system that actually monitors how much ice is still
stuck on the blade. So. The, the implementation of this I think
would be welcome. And it's probably something that, I mean, heating
mats are almost inevitably, they do introduce a certain amount of
challenges, especially with lightning interactions. But generally
speaking, they are a good way for wind turbine blades to to be de
iced. So hopefully this does make its way into more commercially
available products in the future. Allen Hall: Well, it looks like
it will save somewhere between 20 and 50 percent of energy
consumption to, to heat the blade. That would be remarkable if you
could make a, even a 10 percent change in the amount of power
required to heat the blade up. Going to 50 percent would be
astounding. And that makes me think you're going to see this, this
patent idea Phil Totaro: show up pretty soon. I mean, to be blunt,
like, and I'll do respect to Enercon that pioneered a lot of this
technology, but volumetric heating is just wildly inefficient, so
it's like, something that's a more, cost efficient and thermally
efficient solution is probably desirable. Allen Hall: Our next
patent is from Vestas and this. Seems like a relatively simple
idea, but it evidently isn't because they were able to patent it.
So, rather than relying on an expensive jackup vessel for every
major maintenance operation, Vestas has designed a tower with its
own permanent crane system. The crane's base is fixedly mounted to
the tower with a pivoting arm that can be positioned in multiple
configurations, so you can pick up your Cargo container from the
ship, lift it, and then rotate the, this crane that's built onto
the, the transition piece, it looks like, and then put it on deck.
The wind turbine, pretty slick, but it seems like one of those
patents, Phil, that's, doesn't pass the obvious test. Like it's,
seems obvious, like I would need a crane to lift things on and off,
but there must be unique pieces to this that allow the patent
office to issue a patent. What, what actually is unique about it
and what's really, frankly, pretty innovative about it is the fact
that it doesn't take up space on the deck for the transition piece,
because the jib cranes from, pick your favorite brand they usually
are fixedly mounted, as you said, onto the platform itself, but
then it's also requires a longer, a bit of a longer boom arm and it
physically takes up whatever that footprint is to, to mount it to
the, the transition piece itself. Phil Totaro: So I, I like this
conceptually I, we haven't seen this implemented anywhere, and I
don't know if they're likely to do it. I think this is kind of just
defensive IP because , there's still already kind of, a
commercially available solution where they typically mount it to
the Transition piece on the deck, and the reality of that is unless
there's a big reason to, to change that design philosophy, you're
probably going to see this just be kind of a defensive patent for,
for a company like Festus to ensure that nobody else is going out
there capturing the same thing and, developing the next big thing
without owing them a bunch of royalties. Allen Hall: Our third
patent comes from Siemens Gamesa, and it has to do with repairing a
blade root. So if you look at the end of the blade where the fibers
all end and the bolts pop into the root end, there's sometimes
cracking around those holes, and that's not great. You would like
to repair that because those cracks don't necessarily stop and you
want to prevent further damage to the blade. So the way it has
generally been done is you can put a sacrificial plate in there to
kind of stiffen up that area. But if you really need to fix it
becomes sort of a problem. Like, how do you correct this cracking
that's happening and stabilize it? Well, what the Siemens idea is
basically have a Get the blade off where you can get down to the
root end and then machine those areas, so you can put in basically
a metal shim with a gasket around it so it sits in place but
remains sealed and keeps out dirt and debris and all the bad stuff
that can happen along that blade root area, but it provides again a
better surface to mate up with the hub. That is the hard part, and
so typically this gets really expensive to do and it's hard to do
on site. You would have to send it somewhere and the big expensive
machines to do this. So you spend a bunch of money taking care of
it. But Phil, this could be done. Drop the blade down. Bore it. Put
these magical shims in there and save yourself a lot of money, it
looks like. Phil Totaro: Yeah. And, and while they don't explicitly
contemplate doing this as an in situ repair, it's certainly highly
desirable to be able to, to do this out in the field. The
interesting thing though, for me about this idea is it's basically
like, just putting a washer on a nut and a bolt. And the whole
reason you use a washer is because it distributes the load at the
point where, you know, the, the end of the bolt interfaces with
whatever piece of, of metal or, or, carbon or, carbon, Thermal
plastic or whatever, whatever you're interconnecting this to. It's
basically providing a way for you to do that kind of a retrofit and
repair that is going to necessarily strengthen and structurally
reinforce the root, which has been a big problem for Siemens Gamesa
and others over the years. So I, I like this one as an, an
innovative idea. Allen Hall: Yeah, I think you're going to see a
lot more. in the field machining over the next year or two or three
than we've seen in the last 10. And that's going to be a way to
keep some of these blades running long term. It's a great idea and
nice on Siemens to put it into action.