Drone Delivered LEP Robot, Vibration and Acoustic Sensor System

This week on Power-Up, Allen and Phil discuss Bachmann's turbine
monitoring system that combines vibration and acoustic sensing,
Blade Robot's innovative drone delivered LEP robot, and a vest that
allows you to carry your pets with you. Sign up now for Uptime Tech
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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, Alan Hall, and idasaur's Phil Totaro, as we discuss
the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will charge
your energy future. All right, Phil, our First idea is called a
method and device for monitoring a machine state of a machine
system, in particular a wind power plant. Now that's a lot of words
for what is relatively a simple concept from Bachmann, and their
idea is a means of monitoring for natural vibration patterns, which
is kind of what they do already. So this falls right into their
Their skill set, where they're looking for natural vibration
frequencies of a wind turbine over time, and the, the beauty of
this system is as the wind turbine ages and vibrations start to
change a little more erratically, they can point out that something
is off. Not necessarily be able to pinpoint it without having more
data, but to say, Hey, this wind turbine has been altered. Let's go
take a look at it. Bachmann does a lot of updated control systems
for a number of turbines. This could be rather Phil Totaro:
interesting if applied. And here's the really cool thing about
this. I think if you're familiar with like motor racing, for
example Formula One racing, they actually have. People who spend
all day listening to their own car and their competitor's car to
try and get the acoustic signature of the engine and see whether
they're running it at full power, whether they're de-rating it, or
whether or not there's like a, some kind of a mechanical issue
during the course of the practice sessions, qualifying or the race.
And, and that's kind of what Bachmann's adopting, is that same type
of philosophy, to not only do the, the vibration monitoring, but
combining that with the acoustic sensors that will allow you to
determine if the pitch of your gearbox has changed a little bit
through mechanical wear. A lot of just the vibration monitoring can
throw up a lot of false positives. So combining the acoustic
detection capability with the vibration monitoring actually,
hopefully, improves the quality of detecting positive, well, we're
calling it a positive, but detecting an issue. In the in the
mechanical systems. So, kudos to, to Bachmann for, for coming up
with something quite innovative. And, and I think that this is
something that they are if they're not already using it, they are
going to be using it commercially soon. Allen Hall: Well, in the
area of leading edge erosion, there's been a lot of work from a
number of companies and Blade Robots, which is an outgrowth of
Festus. Has a new concept, which I, I think I've seen, Phil, where
they have their leading edge robot, and if you've been at any of
the international conferences, you may have seen this robot where
the blade is sitting horizontally on the turbine, so everything's
uptower, and the robot sits on the blade and then starts sanding
and grinding and applying a new coating, As it moves towards the
root, pretty slick. The, the issue with this whole approach though,
is how do you get this robot on the blade? Well, they're, they're
identifying UAVs as the means to lift and to mount this robot, and
at the same time once the robot starts, it's moving. leading into
erosion cleanup process, the UAV remains attached. So that's always
a concern from operators. I have this robot up there. Does it fall
off? Well, in this particular case, no, because the UAV is hanging
around to make sure everything goes okay. This is a, this is really
a different approach, Phil, than other means of doing leading edge
repair from technicians on ropes to other robotic means. Placing a
UAV with a large robot to fix leading edge repair is Phil Totaro:
It is, and it's, it's really about time and cost efficiency,
because normally, even the first generation blade robots approach,
it was kind of a crane pick and crane delivered solution, where
you'd have the blade in a horizontal position and then you would
use a crane pick to get this thing up, Blade, which again involved
kind of a precision, control and precision lowering of this thing
so that it, it got onto the blade and in just the right way and
wasn't going to further damage the blade with this crane pick. But
then, you'd run this leading edge repair system along the length of
the blade. And when it was done, you had to kind of crane pick it
back down. So as we all know, cranes are expensive. And when you
start talking about, hub heights of 120 plus meters, a crane pick
for this kind of a leading edge repair technology can get
expensive. So. Drones are actually a really great way to not only
deliver this, but significantly reduce the cost. Again, I think
they're still in the testing phase, as far as we know with the, the
drone delivered solution. I believe they're actually looking at
this right now in, in Denmark and, and perhaps in Germany. But at
the moment, if they can make this work, this can be a huge time
saver and cost saver for not only fixing the leading edge erosion
and, and any other leading edge repairs that need to be done, but
also getting this, this autonomous repair platform up there and,
and doing its job in, in, in a time and cost efficient manner. I
think this is, this is fantastic. Allen Hall: Fun Patent of the
Week is by Bryce Belisle, and he has come up with a unique device.
It is clothing with transparent, enclosed passageways for small
pets. The garment, which can be a vest or belt of some type, allows
pets like hamsters and mice to be viewed as they move across the
wearer's body. And The little passageways are integral to the
clothing and terminate in pocket like chambers for feeding and
retrieval. Now, the patent images, Phil, are really fascinating
because they show these pets, I guess, I don't, wouldn't have a
mouse as a pet, but people do, in their natural habitat. So the,
the vest has got all these colorful things on it, so the, the mouse
feels like it's at home, I guess, running through these
passageways. Now, I, Phil, I haven't seen this before. I've been
around a lot, a lot of the world. I've never seen anyone use this.
I've been to California, which I thought was where I would see
this. I've never seen it Phil Totaro: there. This has to be, I
mean, look, we've had the bird diaper on the show. We've had The
method for swinging on a swing sideways. We've had spackling a hole
in the wall. We've had the motorized ice cream cone. I gotta be
honest, this one takes the cake for me, because from the
perspective of, like, things that are totally impractical yet
rather entertaining, this has gotta be At the top of the list,
like, why would you ever, I mean, okay, the fact that you might
have like a gerbil or mouse or animal maze on your vest. But why
would you need to carry your animals with you? I mean, maybe if
you're really that passionate about animals, this is a great
invention for you, and it's maybe sad that nobody ever bothered to
commercialize this, but I don't know what is going on with this
thing. I certainly would not be carrying small animals with me in
this manner.  This is for the true animal lover, Phil. Allen
Hall: You gotta be dedicated to carry your pet around in tubes on
your body.