Power-Up: Vestas Blade Recycling, Siemens Gamesa Noise Reduction

This week we discuss Vestas' system to determine the quality of
wind turbine blades before recycling and Siemens Gamesa's noise
reduction idea. Then Crosswind's blade pitching system to increase
wake mixing and a seemingly common to patch a hole in the wall.
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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, Alan 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, Phil, this week, a number of
really interesting ideas. This first one comes from Vestas and it
is about recycling a wind turbine blades. And it's a, it's sort of
a different approach. The quality of the material that they can
recycle out of a wind turbine blade is obviously based upon how
that blade has been treated or how, what its life looked like ahead
of time. So they're The patent idea is to use machine learning to
determine the quality of the recycled material up front, so they
can process the blades more efficiently. That's an interesting
approach. Come on. Vestas, Philip Totaro: obviously, very creative
company. And to be able to characterize the, the lifespan of the
material prior to trying to take it into the recycling phase.
Because the quality of the material that you're recycling may end
up impacting the, post recycling usage. So for instance, if you're
trying to put it into concrete, you may need a certain grade of,
fiber. That, that is something that could, as, as the industry
continues to kind of grow with this recycling initiatives. This
could come into play in the future, again, I don't know that you
necessarily need machine learning to facilitate all this, I think
that's a bit of a buzzword y, aspect of the invention, but Joel
Saxum: In the grand scheme of things, the way I'm looking at this
problem is this, recycling a blade engineer, or blades, hot topic.
AI machine learning, hot topic, great way for Vestas to throw these
together and boost this thing out for an ESG stamp that says, we're
working on this and we're using AI to blah, blah, blah. At the end
of the day, you need the bill of materials with what the blade was
originally built with, and you need to know whether they got some
crazy kind of LEP on it, or different blade coding for de icing or
something, and that's it. Allen Hall: The second idea comes from
Siemens Gamesa and. It's the, the Bose headset of wind turbine
blades. That's the only way I can describe this thing where it's a
noise reduction system. It's active noise. So what they do like
Bose does is they create an opposite signal. To, to knock, to
cancel the, the noise that the blade is making. So they have an
actuator that sits on the blade and then it has speakers in it and
a little gas chamber to improve its sound ability. And they can do
active noise canceling on a blade. Now Phil, what I'm wondering is,
it's a, it's a cool idea and it's been used in aircraft for a long
time. Is it something that would be used on a Winturn blade? I
mean, they only have very, very narrow applications, I would think.
Philip Totaro: Here's what's interesting about it, is you're
correct that I, I haven't actually seen this in use. I would assume
that they've done some testing on it. Certainly some, lab testing
and potentially some field testing, although likely at a test site.
I as opposed to an actual wind farm. The technology we have today
is pretty much all passive in terms of serrated trailing edges or
other, you can even kind of orient the vortex generators on, on the
blade to provide you with the, the performance benefit and the aero
benefit of it, but also minimize the noise. But those are all
passive solutions. Something like this, As you mentioned, it's,
it's literally trying to do, active noise cancellation on, the, the
vortices that, that come off the, the blade. And it's a clever
idea, to be sure. Whether or not we need it is another question,
because as we're looking, particularly in Europe, as we look to
push setbacks to smaller and smaller distances, going from maybe 1,
500 meters to 1, 000 meters to 500 meters in some countries, this
could come into play and you could need something beyond what you
can get out of the, the, decibel reduction from serrated trailing
edges, for example, And this act of noise cancellation may, may be
necessary. Allen Hall: And our last wind focused idea is, and you
see this a lot, is changing the orientation of a wind turbine
upstream. So the downstream turbines you have are more efficient.
Most of that is focused and that effort is focused on ya moving the
turbines in ya. This patent by a company called Crosswind CV is.
saying they can do a similar thing by pitching the angle of the
blades as they rotate to vary the induction factor. And then that
creates a wake behind the turbines that change over time,
increasing wake mixing. So instead of just turning the turbine a
little bit, Now you're actively moving the blades to create a
downwind effect. This sounds interesting, Phil. It's a different
approach, for sure. But there's some load issues on the blades that
I would be concerned about. Is, is that why it hasn't been
implemented yet? Because it does seem like a good idea. Philip
Totaro: You are correct that a, a pitch only solution would
necessarily introduce a some amount of asymmetric loading
potentially, which does, introduce, fatigue issues, and, and,
component life issues on pitch bearings, and, and even the main
shaft, and, and, et cetera. But, there's nothing that says that
they wouldn't necessarily try to combine this technology with yaw
as well. Because what you really want to be able to do, the whole
point of wake steering is that you don't either introduce loads
into turbines that are downstream from an upstream turbine, or you
also don't want to impact the air performance of the turbines
downstream. So this is a way to Potentially combine this pitch
control system with yaw control to be able to, specifically channel
And steer that wake in in a way that yaw control alone wouldn't
necessarily allow you to do So it's pretty clever and I'm, I'm
gonna say, a lot of things are pretty clever but I believe that
they are going to crosswind which again is Idiko and Shell. I
believe they are going to test this at some of the new North
Holland coast wind farms that they're currently in the process of
building and, and getting commissioned. So I believe this
technology will be tested and they'll, hopefully see a benefit out
of the development of this this innovation. Joel Saxum: What I
would like to see and maybe maybe crosswinds before they get out to
the field with this is Alan and I just had a great conversation a
couple months ago with R& D test systems engineers that are
working on hybrid testing for and a lot of it is for pitch bearings
and some of the other components that are hard to test. I'd like to
see them put something like this. Through its paces in a hybrid
testing environment before they get offshore, because offshore, I
see a lot of costs skyrocketing by doing this. Now, again, I
haven't dove into the, the engineering completely behind this. I've
just read a patent on it. So that might again, my opinion is from
an armchair engineer, but unless you're going to gain a significant
amount of AEP on some large turbines, the O and M costs
skyrocketing, In the long run may offset the a EP gains. Allen
Hall: And for our fun patent of the week, we are looking into
repairing a hole in a wall and who hasn't punched a hole in a wall
lately. And at an inventor in Newport Beach, California has a, pat
has a patent that describes how you can fix that hole. You punch
the wall after watching the Cowboys game. And basically, this
patent is the world's simplest thing, Phil, and I'm struggling to
understand how they actually got a patent for this. So, you punch a
hole in the wall, okay, you got this odd shaped hole in the wall,
kind of fish shaped hole, and then what the patent says is, well,
you make that hole square, a normal shape, and then you cut another
piece of drywall out, that exactly the same shape, and you stuff it
in there, and you patch it over. If this is a real patent, this
gentleman from Newport Beach is extremely wealthy, because I've
seen this on television, on those Home and Gardening Fix It Up
shows, I've seen this used a thousand times. So is it Philip
Totaro: real? Keep in mind that this particular patent, and it is a
patent, Alan, it was issued in 2006, but filed by somebody
originally in 2001. And, based on that, I would like to think that
somebody had probably popped a hole in a wall before and patched it
up with dry, drywall and a spackle, which is basically what this,
this patent describes. I would like to think that prior to 2001,
the that, that concept has been utilized.