IWTG Consulting Insights: Blades, Bearings, and Big Data

Allen and Joel sit down with Jonathan Zalar, Managing Partner at
Independent Wind Turbine Generator Consulting (IWTG). With over a
decade of experience at GE Renewable Energy, Jonathan shares
invaluable insights on recent wind turbine issues, including blade
defects, bearing problems, and the challenges of rapid rotor size
increases. This is a must-listen episode for a deep exploration of
wind turbine maintenance, data analytics, and the importance of
thorough inspections in the ever-evolving wind energy industry.
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www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Allen
Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host,
Alan Hall, joined by my co host, Joel Saxon. Today, we're joined by
Jonathan Zalar, Managing Partner at Independent Wind Turbine
Generator Consulting, or IWTG. With over a decade of experience at
GE Renewable Energy, including roles in root cause analysis and
systems engineering, Jonathan brings a deep industry knowledge to
his consulting work. We'll discuss recent events that we have seen
in the field. Explore how his expertise is helping wind turbine
owners optimize their assets and tackle some industry challenges.
Jonathan, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So you've been
around looking at blades and turbines for the last several months.
Thanks. Thanks. And we've been in contact a little bit about what
you've been seeing. Maybe just give us a brief description of
what's happened this summer in terms of blades and turbines. A lot
of Jonathan Zalar: customers are starting to realize that there's
some, some bigger issues that are coming to a head. And the need to
like, look more is becoming more apparent. So, just because you
have an external crack and you're about to go repair, it doesn't
mean you shouldn't. Maybe take a look inside, especially if it's
easy to get to. I have a few customers that are finding, internal
cracks and needs to monitor some internal. Issues more and more.
So, relying just on drones is maybe not the best thing anymore.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Let, let's, let's talk about that because we're
seeing a lot of internal cracks. It doesn't, the manufacturer
doesn't seem to be important here. It seems to be universal. the
crack situation. Operators don't really have tools to go do that
themselves besides, and they've been using drone inspections
forever. So they, are they interpreting drone inspections external
once it looks good on the outside is probably good on the inside.
And is that the right Jonathan Zalar: move? In most cases, it
probably is, but depending on the type of crack you have and
potentially like some history on the particular blades, you might
want to start taking a look inside. And I think More, I think as I
don't know, the industry keeps going with the blade repairs,
they're going to start finding that, some of these might have
started on the inside versus the outside. I mean, historically,
most of the stuff that's starting on the outside, I mean, you got a
lot of, the coding coming off the small stuff that, cat ones that
you can steal with later, but as some, so you can cat fours and
fives. They started somewhere and if you're not confident it was
the outside, spend the extra money, look on the inside. Joel Saxum:
So, someone like yourself who's got experience like you, you have
experience from GEs, right? So you've been around the block for
most all the, the last ten plus years of GE turbines. You, you
understand them, you know them, you have manufacturing experience,
you have the RCA experience. So someone like yourself going to
help, One of these operators be that extra bit of bandwidth that
they need in engineering. It's, it's priceless for them because the
knowledge that you bring is huge. So we're seeing like, I'm, why
I'm highlighting that is it's important in my mind for some of
these operators to not just look to their internal teams to solve
problems, right? What does it look like? I mean, for clients coming
to you. To solve these problems, is your book full? What does it
look like? Jonathan Zalar: It's pretty full and some of the
problems I do have history with, if they're on a GE, something I
worked on before, but no, there's new problems that are coming up
and that's kind of the part that's exciting for me. It's like, all
right, Hey, we got this at, a bunch of turbines. What is it? I'm
like, well. Cool. I don't know for sure, but this is how I would
address it. And then that's how I help, my customers talk to the
OEM and kind of get to the point of like, all right, what's not so
much what the root cause is. It's like, how big is the LAT list of
affected turbines? The goal of the beginning of most RCA is like,
how bad is it? How much bleeding do I need to stop? And, that's
usually where I spend most of my time initially. And then after
that, it's like, all right, why did this happen? What do we need to
do about it? What's the long term solution? Allen Hall: Are a lot
of the turbine issues we're having today because of the newness of
the turbine, or the length of the blades? There seems to be a lot
of problems out there that are not super old, right? They're a year
or two old. What is the driving Jonathan Zalar: factor Allen Hall:
in that? Jonathan Zalar: My personal opinion? I think the industry
as a whole Went very fast in rotor size. It was, the market was
driven for 18 to 24 month rotor size increases. Right. And the OEMs
were like, all right, how many parts can we reuse? Can it handle
these more loads? And, maybe got too big, too fast. I mean, that's
not OEM specific or anything, but the industry went very fast in
the last 10 years. And I think there's been multiple articles about
all the OEMs slowing down a little bit, right. Reducing their
number of rotors there. They're applying the field Allen Hall: now,
right? Yeah. They're, they're definitely consolidating the number
of models, I think, to recover a little bit and get a beat on how
to handle these longer blades. So what are you, what are you seeing
on these turbines that are less than five years old? What kind of
defects, problems serial defects are out there? Jonathan Zalar: You
the blades ones, I think we've talked about, there's been some
issues on different OEMs with the manufacturing. Issues. Not too
many huge design issues that I've seen. And then, bearings are a
big issue too, main bearings and pitch bearings, they're very
expensive, right? Multiple OEMs are having different bearing issues
and, a lot of that could be back to what I said earlier, like how
fast are you growing this rotor size and are you actually
understanding what these parts are going to be doing, Joel Saxum:
especially long term? Yeah. I mean, I think we've talked actually
between the three of us just about pitch bearings, right? So the
blades got longer. But the diameter of the root didn't in some
cases. So you have the same kind of forces and pressures on that
root diameter, but with further and further basically the fulcrum
of that lever arm moves further and further away and puts more and
more pressure on that thing. So it's hard to keep up with the
design thing there. So bearings being a huge one, do you, do you
see a, a sweeping fix for some of these bearing issues? Now this
is, I'm saying we've got pitch bearings. We've got yaw bearings.
We've got main bearings. Main bearing seems to be a big one right
now. Is there a fix for this or is we going to be on some of these
platforms that are having these issues? Are we going to be
replacing these things every two, three years for their lifetime? I
mean, I don't think it's going to be as bad as two Jonathan Zalar:
to three years. I think. There are other suppliers that are looking
at different answers to these problems, right? The pitch bearings,
I think there's, they're looking at a third, basically, roller
bearing, I believe, on the outside. The other bearing manufacturers
are seeing, okay, hey, these are, these bearings are not working
right now. What else can we do, right? And you can't really
increase the size of the bearings because you can't change the main
shaft. You're not going to change the pillow block or the bed
plate. So they're kind of limited in what they can do. So it's
going to be a lot of, with strength of materials and different
greases too. So there, there will be some fixes that come out.
They're very limited in what they can do just from a real estate
perspective. On the current designs, Allen Hall: the issue comes
about in terms of lifetime on bearings and a lot of operators don't
have a way to guess when they would need to replace bearings. But
seeing, besides seeing parts fall out and if I, if I'm going to
replace a bearing, what am I going to replace it with? Jonathan
Zalar: Right. Well, and even before that, if you can get an
indication that you know, this bearing's gonna fail and you can
derate. And maybe run it for a year and line up the cranes better.
There's opportunities there too, with analytics. So both I, the
greasing is interesting. I'm not heard of that, but that's
definitely an indicator when you start losing coatings as an
example. So if you have that indication, you have higher vibration
and you have some other analytics that kind of package together a,
all right, this bearing's got 18 months. So what are you going to
do about it? Well,