Matthew Stead, CEO of Ping Services, joined us to talk about the Ping Monitor, a device that attaches to the bottom of a wind turbine, listening to the sound of the blades as they rotate past. The Ping system compares the baseline sound to each pass of the turbine, and alerts wind farm operators when changes are detected. The Ping Monitor is so advanced, it can even differentiate and predict which types of damage have occurred--or are occurring--with high accuracy. Watch today's episode on YouTube here.



Follow Ping on Linkedin here; Connect with Matthew on Linkedin Here; Visit them on the web here.



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Transcript: Matthew Stead, on how the Ping Monitor Can Change Wind Turbine Blade Monitoring




https://youtu.be/QtJ5bk4DLV8




Dan Blewett 0:00This episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. At Weather Guard, we make lightning protection easy. If your wind turbines are due for maintenance or repairs, install our StrikeTape retrofit LPS upgrade at the same time. A StrikeTape installation is the quick, easy solution that provides a dramatic, long lasting boost to the factory lightning protection system. Forward Thinking wind site owners install StrikeTape today to increase uptime tomorrow, learn more in the show notes of today's podcast.



All right, welcome back to the uptime wind energy podcast. I'm your co host, Dan Blewett. On today's show, we've got a great guest, Matthew stead, CEO of ping services is here to talk about their ping monitor system. Allen, really interesting conversation with Matthew today, what were some of your takeaways from it?



Allen Hall 1:15Well, ping monitor has a great audio recording system, basically data data analyzer system that just magnetically stick to the side of the wind turbine and takes really important data. So you know, if your wind turbine blades are having problems, it's the thing about this. And talking to Matthew is so fascinated, it seems like it's such an obvious solution. But no one's done it until we got to ping and it's it's a fascinating device. And it really interesting company. And if you own or operate wind turbines or repair wind turbines, this is a good a good one. Because not only do we get to see the technology, Matthew actually shows you all the innards of these of this ping monitor, but also describes how the system works. And that's what you need to know.



Dan Blewett 2:02Yeah, it is a really cool system, because you think of you know, like drone technology is becoming ubiquitous, right? Like camera technology in general. All those things seem to be like the go to for assessing damage. And of course, they still are. But you know, so the ping monitor system, if you're unfamiliar, it's, it's a little dome about this, it looks like at about the size of a, like a fire alarm in your home. And a large part of that dome is just the windscreen. So it's preventing any excess noise just like you see on our microphones here, the the the foam pop filter, and so it listens to the wind turbine blades as they come through their cycle. Every time it goes whoosh, whoosh, it's, you know, it's listening to that sound creates a baseline. And then over time, it's comparing that baseline to the new normal. So if you're, you know, when Tim gets struck by lightning, if it has leading edge erosion a couple years later, it's gonna sound different. And as you'll hear in this in right, from the get go in the podcast, you know, they got the idea from that winter oven, technicians could hear the difference themselves. So again, we can tell like this, something's up with this blade. Like it sounds weird. And again, that's something that you hear in like the auto industry.