MotorDoc’s Electrical Signature Turbine Diagnosis

Howard Penrose from MotorDoc discusses their electrical signature
monitoring for wind turbines that offers precise diagnostics,
enabling cost-effective preventative maintenance and lifetime
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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
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YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the
show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on
Wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering
tomorrow. Allen Hall: Howard, welcome back to the show. Thank
you. Well, we've been traveling a, a good deal and talking to a lot
of operators in the United States and in Europe, and even in
Australia. And, uh, your name comes up quite a bit because we talk
to all the technical people in the world and we see a lot of
things. And I get asked quite a bit, what is the coolest technology
that I don't know about? And I say, Howard Penrose MotorDoc. And
they say, who? And I say, well, wait a minute. If you want
something super powerful to learn about your turbine, that is easy
to implement and has been vetted and has years of in-service
testing and verification. It is MotorDock, it
is [00:01:00] empower for motors, it is empath for
systems and vibration and all the other things. And now empath,
CMS, which is a continuous monitoring system that you're offering
that those systems are revolutionary and I don't use that word a
lot in wind. It's revolutionary in wind and. Let, let me just back
up a little bit because I, I want to explain what some of these
problems are that we're seeing in the field and, and what your
systems do. But there's a, the, the core to what your technology
is, is that you're using the air gap between the rotor and the
stator and the generator to monitor what's happening inside the
turbine. Very precisely. Can you just provide a little insight like
how that magic happens?  Howard Penrose: Okay. It's, it's
basically, we use it as an, as a basic accelerometer. So, um, the
side to side movement of the, of the rotor inside the air gap. Um.
I could get very technical and use the
word [00:02:00] inverse square law, but basically in the
magnetic field I've got side to side movement. Plus every defect in
the powertrain, um, causes either blips or hesitations in the
rotation. Basically, the torque of the machine, which is also
picked up in the air gap, and from a physics standpoint. The air
gap, the magnetic field, can't tell the difference. And, um, both
voltage and current see that as small ripples in the wave form, and
then we just pull that data out. So, um, uh, I, I liken it exactly
as vibration. Just a different approach,  Allen
Hall: right? And that that vibration turns into little
ripples. And then I'm gonna talk electrical engineering, just for a
brief moment, everybody. We're taking it from the time domain to
the frequency domain. We're doing a four a transform. And in that
four a transform, you can see these spikes that occur at, uh, known
locations that correlate back to what the machine is doing 
Howard Penrose: exactly. [00:03:00] They're they're exact
calculations, uh, down to the hundred or even thousandths of a
hertz. Uh, so, uh, when we, when we do the measurements, they come
up as side bands around, uh, whatever. The, the, uh, signature is,
so the amplitude modulation, it's an amplitude modulated signal. So
I have, uh, basically the ripple show up on the positive side of
the waveform and on the negative side of the waveform. So around
everything, I just have plus and minus line frequency. That's,
that's basically the primary difference. Then we just convert it
over to decibels, which makes it, um, relational to the load, which
means load doesn't matter. Uh, so I can compare an unloaded machine
to a fully loaded machine and get the same results,  Allen
Hall: which is also amazing. So the load, what the turbine is
doing doesn't really matter at all, as long as it's rotating and
producing power. You can [00:04:00] monitor what's
happening, sort of anything up, and then the cell. Mostly, 
Howard Penrose: well, it's even, it's even more fun than that
because the air gap in a wind turbine is at a fixed speed for a
dfi. So, uh, it's constantly turning at the exact same speed, which
is basically all I need regardless of the physical speed. So,
vibration, I need to know that physical speed and electrical
signature. I need to know the air gap. Speed.  Allen
Hall: So with this data and the way you're monitoring what's
happening on the turbine is through current sensors on the feeds
and voltage probes. You could do one or the other and, and you've
done both, and we can discuss that for a moment. But just using the
what's happening on the wires, on the generator wires, now he can
determine everything that's generally happening mechanically. So
from gearbox to the blades. The, [00:05:00] the hub, uh,
you can even determine things that are happening up tower a little
bit like ya motors and that sort of thing. If they're acting weird,
you can see changes there. And it's sort of like the pulse of the
turbine  Howard Penrose: and the main bearings. And the
main bearings, right? So all the bearings never leave out the main
bearings. That's, that's a study we're involved in right now. So,
um. Yeah. Uh, oh. Yeah. The, the study right now is, uh, we're
using the technology to map out circulating current sub tower. Um,
so we're, we're looking at, uh, why main bearings are failing, um,
which was missed before. I've got an, I've got a paper coming out
on it. We're kicking off an NRE L study, uh, on it. And we are also
working along with, um, groups in the field and an independent
study all to. Well, a main bearing is a really expensive issue. Um,
and, and we're fine. People are just [00:06:00] finally
figured out that they were failing because of electrical discharge.
And, um, the high frequencies associated with that basically caused
the brushes to become resistors and the bearings to become
conductors. So, uh, we now have a technology that allows us to look
at these very high frequency sound or. High frequency  Allen
Hall: noise. Okay. Let's just use that as a test case for your
system for iPath CMS, because. That is one issue that pretty much
everybody in the United States that uses a particular OEM has 
Howard Penrose: actually, uh, you, you got, you hit it on the
head. It's just like the old W Ring thing. Everybody thought it was
a specific, uh, generator manufacturer turned out to be every DFI
failing the same way we discovered that. Uh, we've also heard, uh,
you know, a specific OEM and a specific. Type of platform. They
were seeing the problems in the main bearings. And again, it just
came about because people were talking about it.
Except [00:07:00] guess what? We're not just seeing it in
the us, we're seeing it globally. That's one of the benefits we
have with so many users worldwide is we're finding out that all of
these problems are not unique to us. They're global in nature and
they're cross platform.  Joel Saxum: So when we talk
cross platforms and, and you, the listeners here will notice that
I've been markedly absent from the conversation so far. 'cause it's
a bit over my head. Sorry. No, it's, it's just, this is, this is
great stuff. But what I, that was one of the things I was wondering
while we were going through this is we were talking about, um.
Solutions that you guys have that can solve specific problems. Now,
does this say I have a direct drive turbine? Or like, is, is there
any models or any types of technology that you can't work on out in
the field or does it Basically we have a solutions that can cover
all turbines regardless  Howard Penrose: if it's got a
magnetic field, whether it's a generator, motor, or transformer, we
can see it. I can follow that. So we even, we even, we even
use [00:08:00] the technology in the industrial side for
power monitoring for plants. Because we get, uh, we get good
insights on what's coming into the facility and what the facility's
putting back into the system, in particular with high frequency
noise and stuff like that, that utilities are just now starting to
pay attention to. Joel Saxum: It's just, this is an important
thing for the CMS system that you guys have, because I'm, I'm
thinking right now, okay, now, now again, I'm gonna dumb this way
down, um, in my. Built Jeeps that I've done in the past, I've
gotten death wobble in the steering wheel because of oscillations
in the front axle. Right? But that only happens at a certain speed,
right? If I, if I could, if I could get through second gear at
about 4,000 RPMs and grab third, I'm fine. But if I have to shift
to 2,500 RPMs, about 32 miles an hour, I'm in a world of hurt,
right? I'm, I'm shaking this thing down the road. So turbines I
know will do that sometimes at certain RPM. They will have
vibration issues that will either go away or expand a resonance or
natural [00:09:00] frequency.  Howard
Penrose: Yeah,  Joel Saxum: right. Like at, at at,
um, you know, four RPM is one thing at seven and a half rpm it goes
away. So having cm, your CMS system, that's their continuously
monitoring when the wind speeds are low, when they're high, when.
Does that help you pick up different anomalies within the turbine
to be able to kind of pinpoint what's, what could be
happening?  Howard Penrose: No, because those frequencies
are always present. They just amplify at certain points in speed,
right? They, they hit a natural frequency, so they just oscillate
like mad. Uh, I'm rereading all of my Tesla books right now. So
where, where he talks about that, you know,