Drone VS. Rover Inspections, AI Crack Monitoring

Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Philip Totaro, and Joel Saxum discuss
the evolution of wind turbine blade inspections, from external
drones to internal rovers. They debate the potential of AI in
predicting damage progression and managing repair priorities, with
Rosemary emphasizing the complexity of crack propagation in
composites. Joel highlights Top 7's innovative drone technology for
detecting lightning protection system faults in blades, as featured
in PES Wind magazine. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly
email update on all things wind technology. This episode is
sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about
Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS
retrofit. Follow the show
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Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes'
YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the
show? Email us! Pardalote Consulting -
https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech -
www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Allen
Hall: On the mean streets of Lowville, New York, Phil that's your
neck of the woods. The local Kraft Heinz plant has reclaimed the
Guinness World Record for the largest cheesecake. Tipping the
scales at a whopping 15, 008 pounds. Yes, that's right. That's
seven and a half tons of creamy goodness. Joel Saxum: I absolutely
love cheesecake. My brother loves cheesecake so much that's what he
had at his wedding. He had a smorgasbord of different kinds of
cheesecake that you could pick from. Allen Hall: They broke the
record, almost double the record that was held from a team from
Russia. So here we go. Now we're back into the 1980s. Olympic
hockey Philip Totaro: exit no that's great that's good that's a
good thing we should be world domination in cheesecake size Allen
Hall: and Philip Totaro: wait. Allen Hall: Yeah why did we get an
invite joel i don't understand we should've been top of the list to
come to lowville. Philip Totaro: That's yeah that's what i'm saying
like did they pass it out to everybody in town like how do you eat
a cheesecake seven tons of cheesecake. Allen Hall: They donated to
local food bank is what they did after everybody had a slice or two
or three. But 15, 000 pounds of cheesecake. What's that in metric
tons, Phil? Come on. I need a sense of this for the Europeans in
our audience. 6. 8 metric tons. That's a lot of metric tons, but
this, these are the things you got to keep your eyes open for,
right? So if they're going for a world record. And anything food
related, they need to be calling the Uptime Podcast and at least
give us a heads up so we can plan our travel accordingly, because
this cheesecake thing seems like we missed out. I'm Alan Hall and
here are this week's top news stories. In our first story, Vestas
has secured its largest onshore wind project to date in Japan. The
company has received a 134 megawatt order from Invenergy. for the
Inaniwa Wind Energy Center. The order includes 32 V117 4. 2
megawatt wind turbines and a 20 year service agreement. Deliveries
are expected to begin in the first half of 2027 with commissioning
planned for Q1 2028. Moving to Spain, Windar has started
preparatory work to construct a new monopile factory. The facility
will have the capacity to manufacture monopiles up to 12. 5 meters
in diameter, 3, 500 tons, and 130 meters in length. With an annual
capacity of 100 to 120 monopiles, the factory aims to supply wind
farms in the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, as well as the East Coast
of the United States. In a significant development for the
Mediterranean region, nine Southern European Union member countries
have pledged to turn the area into a renewable energy hub.
Officials from Cyprus, Slovenia, Malta, Croatia, Greece, Italy,
France, Portugal, and Spain are focusing on harnessing offshore
wind and solar energy. They aim to set up a joint renewable
energies project across borders and have called on the European
Commission to conduct a study on the region's renewable energy
potential. Shifting to Sweden, Northvolt has announced a revised
scope of operations in response to challenging market conditions.
The company will focus on ramping up its first 16 gigawatt hour
production capacity at Northvolt ET. resulting in the redundancy of
approximately 1, 600 employees. Northvolt will suspend the
expansion project at Northvolt at this time. and slowdown programs
at Northvolt Labs. In India, Xcel Composites and its joint venture
Koneko Xcel India have won a bidding process to supply poultry to
Carbon Planks for wind turbine spar caps to Vestas. The products
will be manufactured in KECI's new factory in Goa, India, with
deliveries estimated to begin in the last quarter of 2025. This
agreement extends an existing multi year frame contract and deepens
the collaboration between the companies. And Denmark is making
strides in wind turbine testing capabilities. R& D Test Systems
has completed the foundation of a test bench for main bearings at
the Offshore Renewable Center in Odense Port. The facility will be
able to test both geared and direct drive main bearing arrangements
for 25 megawatt turbines. The project, supported by a 10 million
euro grant from the Danish Greenlab program, is expected to be
delivered in 2025. Lastly, Nikon Corporation is set to provide
Eurus Energy Holdings Corporation with a riblet film for wind
turbine blades, aimed at improving wind turbine generation
efficiency. In Japan's first such verification test, the film will
be attached to turbine blades at the Yurisoya Misaki wind farm.
Nikon anticipates that the Riblet film could improve wind power
generation efficiency by approximately 3%. That's this week's top
news stories. After the break, I'll be joined by my co host,
renewable energy expert and founder of Pardalote Consulting,
Rosemary Barnes, the founder and CEO of Intel Store, Phil Totaro,
And the Chief Commercial Officer of WeatherGuard Lightning Tech,
Joel Saxon. Lightning is an act of God, but lightning damage is
not. Actually, it's very predictable and very preventable. Strike
Tape is a lightning protection system upgrade for wind turbines
made by WeatherGuard. It dramatically improves the effectiveness of
the factory LPS, so you can stop worrying about lightning damage.
Visit weatherguardwind. com to learn more, read a case study, and
schedule a call today. Allen Hall: It's almost fall in the northern
hemisphere, which means that blade inspections are occurring. A lot
of drone inspections are happening right about now at the end of
season after all the repairs have been done. So you're typically
seeing two scans in some wind farms. One in the spring, one in the
fall, just to keep track of how things are progressing. But there's
been a recent big shift, I think, in from moving away from external
drone inspections, which had been the norm, to a lot more of
internal rover inspections. With a little automated car with the
cameras on it and the lights and the beepers and the whole thing.
And I think the industry has really learned from that. I've been
talking to a number of blade engineers and we were at Sandia last
week that the significant structural defects are turning up sooner
on the inside. And that's a big shift, Rosemary, I think, because
for so long, we were just doing drone inspections and when we got
to standardized drone inspection, that was the big deal. But. Now
we're doing inside and outside. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I actually
wondered this because of a job I was on recently They were going to
go do internal inspections that I mean to be honest I hadn't even
been doing external inspections properly But yeah They were going
to go do some internal inspections and I just wondered how they
actually get into the blade like I know that you can get in between
the two webs and trailing edge is mostly pretty clear, but in the
leading edge between the front web and the leading edge, there are
bulkheads all the way down these bits of foam or whatever. They're
structural, mostly not, mostly to assist with manufacturing, but
they're blocking off the cavity. You can't just crawl into the
leading edge cavity and crawl all the way down, no matter how small
you are, because you're going to encounter these solid obstacles.
What do they do about that? Are they punching their way through
them, which it being, like I said they're not primarily structural,
but they're not structural. How do they manage that? Allen Hall: I
don't think they're doing anything at the bulkheads. I think a lot
of it is right between the spars, the shear webs. And I think from
what I can tell so far, are they not looking for problems with core
splice areas, transverse cracks? Which are the Cat 4, Cat 5s that
you would need to know. I know they have leading edge and trailing
edge dis bonds, but the big ones seem to be in the mid span region.
Rosemary Barnes: That's true, that they would catch most of the
catastrophic, like most of the catastrophic stuff would happen on
the main laminate, which is, yeah, right down the middle where it
should be possible to get a really long way down, so I guess they
can probably capture most of it. But yeah the system that, or the,
one of the things that, I know that they're looking for with drone
inspections is, when lightning flashover happens, then that can
cause damage on the inside. And you might not see it on the outside
until it's like a category five and the blades about to snap in
half. That can obviously happen on the leading edge. And yeah, but
I guess maybe they're not catching all of that, but they're
catching other damage that. Might cause big structural problems.
Makes sense. Philip Totaro: Wouldn't it make sense to have a
channel running the length of the blade adjacent to the one of the,
like the front or the rear spar so that you could put, rather than
a Rover,