Fibersail’s Fiber Optics Prevent Costly Repairs

Carlos Oliveira, CEO of Fibersail, discusses their advanced fiber
optic technology for early detection of wind turbine blade damage,
reducing downtime and optimizing maintenance for wind farm
operators. 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
on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit
Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes'
YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the
show? Email us! Allen Hall: Wind turbine blade failures cost
the industry billions annually. Today we're talking with Fibersail,
CEO, Carlos Oliveira About their innovative fiber optic technology
that detects early blade damage before catastrophic failures occur.
Learn how their shape sensing system is helping wind farm operators
reduce downtime and optimize maintenance. Welcome to Uptime
Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy's brightest innovators.
This is the progress powering tomorrow. Carlos, welcome to the
program. Thank you for having me here.  Allen Hall: This
is gonna be a fascinating discussion. when I was over at Wind
Europe, the activity around your booth was really good. a lot of
interested people wanting to learn more about the technology and
how to protect their blades and be able to determine early if they
have blade problems. And I think everybody on
the [00:01:00] podcast knows that blades are a huge issue
financially. And we just don't have enough information about how
they are moving structurally or what kind of structural issues
they're having. How big do you think this problem is, Carlos? 
Speaker 3: I agree with you. So we have quite a busy Wind
Europe event. we were really full all the, time. and I think that,
the problem is really, getting out, right? It's every year, more
than. Five, $6 billion are being spent in non-planned repairs
activities. and this is impacting a lot to the bottom line of the
industry. what we knew at fiber cell 3, 4, 5 years ago, that the
problem was really big Honda blades. Now it's mainstream knowledge.
big companies are putting billions of euros, in, recognizing losses
because of this issue. And more and more customers are coming to
us. it's [00:02:00] really a big issue and we believe
that, it can really put in danger the wind industry as a
whole.  Allen Hall: Yeah. And even if you buy a new
turbine today, there is very little information that comes from the
blades themselves. A lot of it is coming from the SCADA system, and
that's, those SCADA systems are not designed to detect this sort
of. Issues that Fibersail can detect. Correct?  Speaker
3: Yeah. And I think it's we are building bigger and bigger
blades, using old technology, right? It does not work. you have a
mixture for a big explosion happening, and that's exactly what we
are seeing. If in the past, the turbines, they were showing
problems after 5, 6, 7, 8 years of operation. Today we have
customers that come to us. with big problems in blades after one,
two years of operation, some of them still during the warranty
period. So it's really becoming a big issue and that's where our
shape sensing technology kicks in because we have advanced sensing
technology. For the most [00:03:00] advanced, turbines
out there and the new ones, it's really good interior, but the
reality is a different story.  Allen Hall: how soon
should you install a system onto a blade, particularly a new blade?
Should it go in at the factory or, immediately after in the
warranty period, or a lot of operators that we have seen, like to
install them at year five or six of operation, which seems. Late to
us.  Speaker 3: I tend to agree, we would prefer to have
it installed, at the manufacturing. we know it's not,
straightforward. and what we're doing, and this is let's say our
go-to market strategy, we are working with end customers, the owner
operators of the turbines. the ones that have the hurdle, they have
the problem to solve. And we are working with, many of them. We are
deploying, we are doing a retrofit installation. And that data then
can be used to convince CEMS to integrate this technology. Of
course, that's our end goal. we understand it'll take, a bit of
time, [00:04:00] transparency, the level of transparency
we bring with our, chef sensing technology. sometimes, people try
to avoid it, at the beginning, but we want really to use the data
from the field and the value that we deliver to our customers. To
push this into the product. So hopefully the next place that, the
customers are buying from the OEMs will have, fiber cell
technology, inside it. Joel Saxum: Let me ask you a little bit
of a question about that, how it fits into the marketplace. 'cause
we're gonna get into the amazing technology that you guys have. But
I just wanna understand, because when we talk to operators a lot of
times we're like, Hey, I'd love to implement this solution, but
hey, I can't do this until end of warranty. Or it's, I'm under full
service agreement for the next five or 10 years, or whatever that
may be. And the OE EMM doesn't wanna allow me to put this CMS on or
this aftermarket product or these things. and contractually those
things can be, those contracts can be pretty tight where you can't
even put stuff on that's even air gapped. How have
you [00:05:00] guys dealt with, that, or have you ran
into those, hurdles yet?  Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely.
We, have, so we, there are different kinds of customers. Of course.
If there is no contract, trying to block anything like this, we
can, we have an easy entry. And we have some customers like that.
others, they really fall into what you said, some of them even
during the warranty, period. we, at Five Cell, we are our position
here, we are a solutions provider and we position ourselves as a
solutions provider for the industry, not necessarily for one or the
other side of the industry. So we don't want to be used. As a
source of information for one side of the industry to try to attack
the other side. We really see that the industry has an issue and,
we want to provide transparency to avoid costs and to make wind,
competitive, source of energy. and so in
those, [00:06:00] situations, usually we try to do a
cooperation with three parties. So fiber cell gen customer, and the
OEM, if possible. So we always try to invite them. To the table if
possible. because, we, have cases where actually, the contract is
blocking the entry of, sensing technology like ours, but the
customer is losing above the cap of compensation from the O end. So
they are losing lost production. So the problem is really big. So
there needs to be a, found a solution. At the same time, the OEM is
losing money because they are paying the compensation okay, till
the cap. But they are paying a lot of money and they'll need to pay
this for 20 plus years. So we position ourselves as a solution
provider on both hands. Of course, it's not easy, but as I usually
said here with the team, if it was easy, it was already done. So we
are in the. let's  Allen Hall: talk about the technology
just for a [00:07:00] moment. It's obviously Fibersail.
The technology is in the name, it's fiber, but I, wanna understand
a little bit about how are you using the fiber, how it's installed,
where does it go? What is the, electronics or the electrical boxes
that are connected to it? What does the system look like? 
Speaker 3: as I said, fiber, it's easy. The sail part I can do
here a connection, right? Fi fiber cells started measuring the
shape of the sail of the sailboat. and now what we're doing is
applying the technology to a different cell, right? A blade is a
rooted cell and what we are doing is really to get the added level
of information of how that sale is behaving, in real time. And so
what, we build actually is our shean technology. That's the unique
approach. We built a fiber optics beam that we glue inside the
plate. We go from the root till where we can install in the
retrofit. Of course, when we do the integration in the product, in
the end, we can go all the way to the [00:08:00]tip. But
that's a possibility for a later stage. and basically we
encapsulate all the fiber optics, all the. technology that does
require, more, detailed level of expertise from the people in the
field. We encapsulate everything into a system and then we hand
over the system, to a normal field technician that can simply glue
our sensor to the blade, plug the power, and then we are on, 
Allen Hall: we are working. Wow. Okay. And how many pieces of
fiber would typically go in a blade? Is it a, bundle of fibers in
one specific area, or is it. Spread out across the blade
structure.  Speaker 3: We have, two products today. We
are working onto the next two. they are still, not at commercial
level, but basically we have, our shade sensor. That's our, core
technology. But we also have, for example, in our product line, the
standard load sensors. It'll be incredible to know that more and
more customers also need this kind of
data. [00:09:00] even basic load sensing data is not
available for the end customer and we can provide it. and so the
setup really depends on what the customer wants. So if the customer
just wants, very limited information, for example, we can provide a
system with the load sensors in it. If the customer wants, for
example, early damage detection, we put our shape sensor in it and
we actually had on top. Hotspot sensor to do really the early
damage detection. So it really depends on what the customer needs,
what we do, we call it internally, tailored made, but at scale it's
that we adjust and we make a system using all the resources we have
in our product line,