Siemens Gamesa Blade Closeout Plates, Vestas & ZF Plastic Torque Tube

This week on Power-Up, we discuss Siemens Gamesa's method for
stabilizing wind turbine blades by installing closeout plates. Then
Vestas and ZF's idea to replace the metal torque tube in the
gearbox with a plastic piece, protecting from current. And finally,
an Enercon patent for painting blades in an ombre pattern to lessen
visual disturbances. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly
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Allen Hall: Welcome to Power Up, the uptime podcast focused on the
new, hot off the press technology that can change the world. Follow
along with me, Allen Hall, and IntelStor's Phil Totaro, as we
discuss the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will
charge your energy future. All right guys, our first idea is what's
turbine blades, and it's an idea from Siemens Gamesa, and it In
patent form, as they describe it here, it's what they call a novel
approach to stabilizing wind turbine blades without the need for
traditional trailing edge beam designs. But what they're really
doing is they're installing closeout plates on the, between the aft
spar and the trailing edge. So, This idea is pretty much making a
wind turbine blade look a lot like an airplane wing, Phil. Philip
Totaro: Yeah, especially like an older style airplane wing. So
those that aren't familiar with the closeout plate, it's like a rib
design that has this, vertical element at different longitudinal
locations throughout the Kind of the, the max cord section and in
inner portion with the exception of like the, the immediate root
section of the blade. But it's, it's interesting to me, besides
just the, the general concept here, the timing of this was
fascinating to me because they filed for this patent back in April
of 2024. And the patent has now published in October and the
question Is, is this a potential fix to a problem? Is this what's
this really doing? Allen Hall: Well, it's stopping torsion is what
it's doing, Phil. It's preventing the blade from twisting too much,
which makes me think of a couple of blades that I'm familiar with
that have torsion problems. Joel? Joel Saxum: Well, if you look at
the image here, so I've crawled around in quite a few blades doing
RCA's and failures, and you're always looking for failure modes, so
you start getting into a different mindset of when you're crawling
around in them. But In multiple blades that I've been in, there's
an, what looks like an extra shear web in the, in some of like the
max cord region and stuff like that, just to make sure that you
keep that part of the shell supported and then that structure rigid
there. And in this design, they're removing that extra shear web
and putting these closeout plates in there. And it is exactly like
you guys say, the design looks like an airplane wing with a bunch
of ribs in it. And to me, in my mind I'm, I'm not a, trained
structural engineer, but from engineering principles and just kind
of physics and forces and a little bit of knowledge there, this to
me looks like it could solve some, some pretty big issues. However,
in maintenance, that makes things a little bit more difficult
because maintenance and construction, because it's harder to place
these things in construction, of course, and to get them right. We
already sometimes have a hard enough time placing shear webs and
getting those right. Now you're adding perpendicular components and
multiple of them. So that makes that a little bit more difficult.
And then, you're checking more glue, glue lines and bond lines and
these kinds of things. But then, of course, what we've seen in the
last two to four years and wind and the explosion of internal
inspections. The only way you're going to do an internal inspection
on one of these blades is, from a structured standpoint, is with
like an Elios drone or something like that, if they can fit through
the holes in the closeout panels. But you're not going to do it
with a crawler anymore. So there's some like manufacturing things,
some trade offs with O& M. However, to me, it looks like if you
could get this right, you might end up with some more structurally
rigid blades. That could, could alleviate some of these cracking
and, and blade failure issues we have. Allen Hall: Our next idea is
from Zedaph Windpower and Vestas Wind. And it has to do with
gearboxes and preventing electrical Currents, stray electrical
currents from damaging the gearboxes, the drivetrain, and causing
havoc and warranty claims and all kinds of other things. As you, as
you pass through a gearbox, there's usually a tube that sits in the
middle of this where you can put hydraulics or electrical signals
or whatever you want through them. However, when you put a piece of
metal in this, in this drivetrain, it provides a pathway for stray
currents to flow and thereby causing Damage to the gears and the
bearings. And this idea from ZF Investus, takes that tube and makes
it out of plastic. Seems like a really simple change, Phil. Philip
Totaro: It is, but what's interesting about it is a couple of
things. First, not only that, that kind of physical interpretation
of this idea to just have a, a portion of what would otherwise be
a, a metallic but non structural component just changed over to
plastic, it might seem like a really simple, stupid idea. But I
gotta be honest, like, a lot of times, those are the things that A,
are gonna help you with maintenance or otherwise solve a problem
that's being caused by the fact that you were using the metal in
the first place. The other aspect of this is the fact that, because
this is a joint, patent application between ZF and Vestas. This is
potentially technology that's already being used on the large
onshore machines. We're talking about the V162, V172 kind of
product families or the large offshore machines like the V236 and,
and above. So, the fact that we know that there's a commercial tie
in between ZF and Vestas on those those gearboxes means that we
hope to be able to see this kind of technology used in real life
applications soon. Joel Saxum: Yeah, Allen and I being part of the
lightning world, and of course, Allen being an electrical engineer,
we hear about a lot of problems within turbines with stray voltage,
whether it's static buildup or stray voltage coming from the
turbine itself, and disregard the idea of even lightning moving
around. They can wreak havoc on electronics. They can throw alarms
that you don't want to see. They can ruin coatings. They can do all
kinds of things. So Vestas and ZF looking at, Fixing this problem.
Maybe it's something that they've learned and lesson learned from
or something that they're foreseeing good on them. And it's good to
see innovations like this making their way into the market. Allen
Hall: All right. Our next patent idea is on a rotor blade and, and
painting the rotor blade, different colors to reduce the visual
impact. Now this is really fascinating. So the concept goes like
this. You, you take, you paint a part near the hub, a lighter
color. color. And then as you move out towards the tip, you paint
that a darker color, like the color of the sky. So it's blue or
maybe even the color of the ground, green or brown to, to match the
landscape. So when the rotor is spinning, this color gradation
creates an optical illusion that makes the overall rotor diameter
appear about 10 to 20 percent smaller than its actual size. Now,
the only thing I can compare this to, Phil, is when you walk into a
home and they have Two differently painted colored walls and the
shape of the room changes. It's an optical illusion of sorts. It
sounds like that's what they're headed for in this painting scheme
for wind turbine blades. Philip Totaro: It is. And this, so for
those that aren't familiar, this is a patent from Enercon. This was
originally filed in Germany in October 20th, 1999. So we're
certainly talking about what is now an expired patent. So if other
companies wanted to be able to use this technology, they could.
What's interesting about this and the other Enercon patent about,
they, they literally patented painting the wind turbine tower
different shades of green, and you may have seen this if you've
seen, some of the wind farms in Germany or Austria or elsewhere in,
in Europe where they've actually implemented this technology it was
part of being a social acceptance of wind turbines. And that's,
that's originally what the, the concept was behind it. Why they
patented it is something I still kind of question to this day. And
the reason we're talking about something that's an expired patent
in the first place is, we, we have the luxury to be able to, look
back and say over the last, 20 plus years has this really been a
competitive differentiator for a company like Enercon selling their
wind turbines? I'd have to say no. So the, the question of whether
or not you want to spend, and, and companies will do this, they'll
spend upwards of 400, 000 on a single patent over the lifetime of
the patent for all the countries that you could potentially go file
your patent in. We're talking about, major international markets
where you're going to sell wind turbines. That's the U S throughout
the EU jurisdictions like Brazil, Japan, China, Australia, et
cetera. Canada, that, other major markets where you're, you're
gonna sell your wind turbines,