Helicoid: Strengthening the Leading Edge

Allen Hall speaks with Helicoid Industries' Dr. Lorenzo Mencattelli
about their groundbreaking wind turbine blade LEP technology, which
uses a biomimetic fiber pattern inspired by mantis shrimp. Their
solution reduces erosion damage by 70% and can work with existing
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https://www.windaustralia.com Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining
light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress
powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy
Podcast. I'm your host, Alan Hall, and today we're discussing one
of the most persistent challenges in the wind energy industry,
beating edge erosion on the wind turbine blades. To discuss an
innovative solution to this problem, we're joined by Dr. Lorenzo
Micatelli, the Managing Director of Tech and Ops at Helicoid
Industries. At Helicoid Industries, Lorenzo is spearheading the
development of a groundbreaking technology that could significantly
reduce leading edge erosion damage on wind turbine blades. Lorenzo.
Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Lorenzo Mencattelli:
Thank you very much, Allen for having me. Allen Hall: So leading
edge erosion is one of those top issues, and I first ran across
your company at DTU, at the Leading Edge Erosion Conference, and
all the experts all around the world were there. I think it was in
February or March earlier this year. And I sat through all the
presentations and then Helichord came up and gave a presentation,
and I was astounded because I hadn't seen anything like this
technology before. But first I want to talk about how big of a
problem this is, and I think during that DTU conference we realized
it's a couple percentage points of power loss for a lot of
operators, and it's structural damage when leading edge erosion
penetrates through the shell of a winter blade. That's a huge
problem. Lorenzo Mencattelli: Yeah, exactly. So the, the, the small
percentage power loss is often acceptable if you want, because it
doesn't really force the operator to, to stop the blade and, and
perform maintenance and repair. But when the erosion gets to the
composite substrate and therefore the structural integrity of the
blade is compromised, then it carries a whole lot of other issues.
And, and then operations need to stop. Allen Hall: Yeah, and that's
where you see all the repair work going on, particularly in the
United States, in the middle of the United States, where leading
edge erosion has penetrated to the shell, and the amount of time
and effort of independent people. service providers going and
fixing blades, leading edge erosion is a, is an industry upon its
own. And it's a little shocking actually that your technology
hasn't been used yet. I want to just describe it here in a second
because the, right now in order to prevent leading edge erosion out
of the OEMs, the manufacturer's equipment, you have to apply
Plastic, basically plastic shells or rubberized plastic shells or
put some sort of thick coating on to the blades, which is somewhat
effective. I would say it's going to give you a couple of years of
life, but there really hasn't been a true fix. Lorenzo Mencattelli:
Yeah, so the, the focus indeed has been mainly on developing new
solutions for the coating, right? That is applied on the, on the
leading edge, while there is no be any engineering on the composite
substrate underneath. And the reality of things is is that the
operator, you know, spin their blades way beyond the erosion of the
coating. So initially when we deployed. When we thought of this
solution, we wanted to find something that would work together with
the coating. So initially, we are not considering replacing
entirely the coating with our fiber architecture. But the idea is
to give the operator an extra margin of safety once the coating has
been eroded to keep their blade spinning, produce energy and not
worry about having issues of structural integrity because now the
composite substrate has the strength to endure that erosion. Allen
Hall: Yeah, and the failure mode on the structural side as it was
described in your presentation, was the resin. Basically, the
plastic that holds everything together, right? That the fibers go
typically at 090 if you're biaxial, and then you have these, these
little pockets that are resin, and unsupported resin, has trouble
in rain erosion. So it wants to be eaten away. And once you start
to break that resin down, you get through one layer, then the next
layer, the next layer. Pretty soon your, your fiber doesn't have
any support structure. It gets eroded away. And then you're through
the blade. Now Your solution is really unique in the sense that
you've thought about the way lineage erosion happens, but you've
also sort of tied it to the animal world. I want you to describe
that for a second. Like, how did this idea come up and, and sort of
describe how that animal world translates into materials? Lorenzo
Mencattelli: Yeah, so this is actually part of a discipline called
biomimicry, where we take inspiration from features and some
aspects of creatures and plants that can be found in nature. And
trying to understand the relationship between the features that we
observe and their function and then translate that into engineering
principle and apply to material systems and so on. So in this case,
we we got inspiration from this specific microstructure that can be
found actually in a wide range of creatures, including the mantis
shrimp which is our mascot, if you want. And the shrimp uses it's
club to strike praise. It feeds on, it deploys underwater at very
high speed caliber bullet speed, and it, it manages to crack shells
of creatures which are considered to be quite tough themselves. So
if you look inside the club, you will see that this is in fact, a
fiber reinforced composite structures is made out of unidirectional
layers, which are slightly rotated one to respect to each other. to
form this helicoidal distribution of fibers. So we are mimicking
that and we initially deployed that solution for improving impact
performance of of a wide range of applications from aerospace,
automotive and so forth. And then we started thinking whether The
same architecture could have been beneficial. So, so for, for rain
erosion, because eventually the, the rain, the rain droplet is a
low mass, high frequency, high speed type of impact that happens in
an area of the, of the blade. And by orienting and redistributing
into an helicoidal way, the fibers in the composite substrate, we
are able to better redistribute stresses. That follows from the
from the high velocity impact of the rain droplet, and therefore
the structure is able to endure more impacts without an early on
onset of erosion. Allen Hall: So, if you go to Helicoid's website,
which is helicoidind. com, you will see this mantis shrimp hammer,
and the sort of microscopic images of it, and it, it is a series of
fibers. It looks like a composite structure. It's very interesting,
by the way, so everybody should go look at that. But you're right,
it, the, the mantis shrimp has this helicoid pattern. type of
arrangement of the fiber, which is much more tightly packed. So
instead of zero 90 or plus or minus 45, how we typically do things
in composite world, it's, it's every 15 degrees, maybe every 10
degrees, it's the, the pattern starts to rotate. So it's, it makes
a much more Dents, fiber composite structure, and as you mentioned,
composite structures are not forgiving on impacts. In the airplane
world, which I've worked for a long time, that thing about
composites around landing gear is any kind of rock that gets thrown
up makes a dent and it damages it immediately. It's a constant
problem. It's a constant repair problem, much like in wind
turbines. This layering of the fabric and at different orientations
then does create this little bit of a different structure. What
happens when you put this structure, and I want to put a little
framework around this, using existing materials, existing resin
systems, existing fibers, I reorient those fibers in a much more
prescribed way. What happens when you take it to rain erosion
testing? What do you see? Lorenzo Mencattelli: Well, what it
happens is you don't see erosion for quite a few a few hours of
testing. So we have we have done extensive rain erosion testing
comparing a conventional substrate, as you mentioned, a plus minus
45 zero degree fiber, fiber orientation substrate, and we use the
exact same fiber, the exact same resin, the exact same
manufacturing process, but with our helicoid design leading edge.
To show that instead of getting larger chips of material being
removed very quickly as the erosion progresses in our case, we have
a very smooth and slow erosion of the substrate. So, for once, you
reduce by more than 70 percent the eroded mass under the same
testing conditions. And for second, you also get a smoother
erosion, which decreases the loss in performance, aerodynamic
performance, and also allows for easier and faster repairs. Because
now you can probably do a light sanding to recover the the shape of
the profile instead of having to do a big cutoff and repatches of
the of, of the leading edge. Allen Hall: Yeah, it's a different
kind of wear effect,