Power-Up: Mitsubishi Lightning Protection, NextEra Cable Saver

This week, Allen and Phil discuss NextEra's Inventus Holdings
patent to increase the longevity of cable bundles on wind turbines.
And Mitsubishi Heavy Industry's system for measuring lightning
current on a wind turbine blade. Plus a groundbreaking method for
swinging on a swing... Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly
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www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com 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. It's been a beautiful day. Busy week in
new ideas, Phil, and our lead off for this week is a cable bundle
longevity on wind turbines invention from Inventus Holdings. And
Inventus Holdings is actually who, Phil? Philip Totaro: It's
NextEra Energy's holding company for all their IP filings. So,
what's interesting about this is not just the invention they came
up with, but the fact that asset owners and operators in the past
Let's say five to seven years have started filing patents on a lot
of different technologies, including something like this, where,
they wanted something that would provide them better vibration
isolation for the, the cables that are running up and down the
tower on a wind turbine. And that's basically what it is. It's a,
it's a cable harness. It's not particularly the sexiest sounding
invention but it's the design was something developed by NextEra
because of their field experience. They saw that there were a lot
of cable bundles that were having abrasion related reliability
issues, and they, they developed this as a means to provide some
kind of vibration isolation and, and abrasion isolation for the,
the cable bundles to preclude them having to go out there and, and
service these things more frequently as they were having to do in
the past. So, kudos to to NextEra on developing something that's
going to. Save them time and money doing field repairs. So the, the
concept, Allen Hall: it's a little hard to visualize, but if you've
ever used a lathe, if you have, you're turning big objects in a
lathe, you need a way to support it on one end it and let it rotate
the same time. So it looks like a lay support it's basically what
it is where the harnesses can move around internally to without
friction to cause damage because a lot of operators have cable
damage right there at the yaw deck because the cables rub against
one another and against, and against the deck, which is crazy
because the resulting failure modes are ugly and timely take a
bunch of time to repair and, So good on Aventus and good on NextEra
for coming up with this idea. So our next idea is a lightning
protection system for turban blades from MHI, Mitsubishi Heavy
Industry. And this one's a little unique. It's sort of in my
ballpark here in the lightning world. Where they're trying to
measure lightning current, where it attaches to the blade, and
they're envisioning, the Mitsubishi engineers are envisioning,
putting a metal leading edge on a portion of the blade near the
tip, obviously, and then having a metal tip, and to measure the
current on each one of those, to see where lightning is striking on
the blade. It seems rather simple at first, Phil, but I think the
implementation of this can be difficult. Philip Totaro: Yeah, and
it's, it's funny because, I mean, the question I have to you maybe
is, is this really something that the industry needs? And how, how
accurate could something like this even get? Oh, I think it can be
very Allen Hall: accurate. The question is, do they need it? We're
working with a lot of operators around the world. At the moment,
where lightning attaches on the blade is important, but if it
attaches anywhere within the last couple of meters on the blade,
not a big worry, as the structural engineers will tell you, once
you get about 10 meters down and you start taking lightning
punctures, the structural damage becomes more significant, of
course, this patent doesn't address it, but this patent is trying
to get at, I think one of the key lightning issues at the moment
is, Where is lightning attaching to the blade and what kind of
lightning is attaching to a particular part of the blade? Very
important information. It's a, it's a good idea and it must be
based on some of the service history that Mitsubishi has run into
with their wind turbines. Yeah. Good concept. All right, Phil, the
last idea on the docket is a method of swinging on a swing. Philip
Totaro: Sometimes during the course of the, the cataloging of all
these patents, which, which we do at Intel store for technology
intelligence and intellectual property risk mitigation. We come
across things that are just so kooky that we have to talk about
them. And this is a patent that was filed in the year 2000 for a
method for swinging on a swing. And literally, we're showing the
picture now on screen, but if you, if you read through this thing,
it's literally not any more complicated than just either back and
forth or side to side, or maybe combinations thereof. And that's
literally what these people have tried to patent with, with this,
and I'm, I'm befuddled, as I usually am with these, with these
wacky patents that we do, but I am just befuddled. Allen Hall:
Well, the inventor called it Tarzan swinging, so you, normally you
go sort of front to back on a swing. What this one was is going to
side to side, which I'm sure the person in the hot seat here It
would make you tremendously nauseous. Swinging by itself isn't bad,
but if you add in a side element to that, I see a lot of upset
stomachs in this scenario. But, the one piece about this patent is
the patent office came back and revised it. And canceled all the
claims. Philip Totaro: Originally, right. Allen Hall: Right, so
even though the patent examiner had blessed it and let it go
through, evidently there was opposition to it, probably from people
like you, Phil, that go through these patents and said, this is
ridiculous. This can't stand. And so the patent office essentially
rescinded it. So good on the patent office. We like to see it more
happen more often, I think. Philip Totaro: But I'll tell you what,
Alan, my absolute favorite part about this whole thing, besides
everything we just covered, is that it's literally stated in this
patent application, actual jungle forestry is not required.