In this episode of the uptime wind energy podcast, we discuss robotic technology by Bladebug, drone blade cleaning by Aerones, floating wind aquaculture and more. Can we really build a fishery or lab on a floating wind turbine? Maybe...



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EP35 - BladeBug Robotic Tech, Wind Turbine Blade Cleaning & Floating Wind Turbine Aquaculture Labs?



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welcome back i'm allen hall i'm Dan Blewett and this is the uptime podcast where we talk about wind energy engineering lightning protection and ways to keep your wind turbines running all right welcome back this is the uptime podcast i'm your co-host Dan Blewett on today's episode we've got six main topics first off we're gonna chat about Siemens Gamesa potentially uh making a pretty big loss here with uh having to replace faulty gearboxes we're going to chat about an interesting multi-use project for potentially floating offshore wind turbine platforms so i think this is sort of a natural progression so we'll chat about some of the ways aquaculture might come to floating wind we're going to talk about a little bit of lightning news where ai is getting closer to predicting predicting where lightning will strike in advance which is crazy we're going to talk about elf so some electric magnetic stuff as far as bearings and gearboxes we're going to chat about robotic uh blade critters the blade bug pretty interesting technology crawling up wind turbine blades and doing some inspections uh repairs and then we're going to talk about cleaning which is something that i don't think it's enough press when it comes to not only wood turbines just in general but also the lightning effects as well talking about that so Allen let's start here with Siemens Gamesa so it looks like they've lost uh 70 million euros uh article from energy watch on faulty gearboxes ouch that's a yeah right yeah gearboxes you know you see that well Siemens Gamesa is now pushing the their how many is it 14 megawatt direct drive 14 dds right okay so yeah so the gearboxes uh are just a failure point which is why the direct drive starts to make a little more sense the the issue with gearboxes is there's vibration components there's that can happen uh obviously lubrication is a big deal uh any sort of material failure metal failure inside of those things can be a problem so it's just not not a huge news point but i think it sounds like they have some cracks in the case which are i guess probably fatigue related um or material related and they got a material issue with the casting that they didn't expect and you know what are you going to do besides replace them there's really nothing to do about it because once you start there's a there's one thing if you can get inside and start taking out different parts of the gearbox and replacing them but if you start cracking the case it's like the uh cracking the block on a internal combustion engine it's pretty much over there's not a lot nothing to do about that you can't weld it back up that's just not a thing so uh this is a big problem and i think they found it from what i could read they found it actually on their test bed first which is where you want to find those things uh before you start seeing yeah prototype yeah which is where you want to find them right you want to try to this this is a very common engineering thing to do is you can't run the your piece of equipment out for 20 years and then s...