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Uptime 107
[00:00:00] Rosemary: I have really strict LinkedIn feed hygiene. So if something has like thousands of, of likes or shares, I immediately like you don't, don't spend time looking at it. Immediately click on the three dots and say, don't show me content like this, the topic isn't isn't
[00:00:15] Allen: Whoa.
[00:00:15] Rosemary: Relevant. Yeah, and if I have, I have somebody who...
[00:00:21] Rosemary: yeah. So, so do do it religiously. You can't even look at it, like don't even let your eyeballs leave. Welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your co-host Allen hall with Dr. Rosemary Barnes from Australia. From the land down under Rosemary.
[00:00:43] Rosemary: You don't have to call me doctor.
[00:00:44] Allen: No. Okay. It's better than mr. I suppose.
[00:00:49] Rosemary: yeah, that's true. That's true.
[00:00:50] Allen: We ha we have a really interesting show today. There's a lot going on in wind. It seems like the world is awakening and there's just activity all over the place. Let's, let's, let's get started on a, on a, a couple things that happened in Texas. So there was some it's it's that springtime season in Texas, which means there's gonna be tornado.
[00:01:09] Allen: And there was a tornado and, and, or a couple of TA tornadoes, 18 tornadoes to be exacted up in north, Texas, just kind of north and a little bit west of, of Dallas, if you know, your Texas geography, and they had multiple wind turbines that were damaged, the blades that were damaged in those, in those tornadoes and Rosemary, it looked like the blades had melted.
[00:01:32] Allen: a couple of winter, but it just, everything drooped.
[00:01:36] Rosemary: Which, yeah, to me, it looks like you like, if you grow flowers in your garden, and then at the end of the, the season, you know, some of the pedals have fallen off and the other ones are kind of limp. It's got a really, really sad look like that about it.
[00:01:49] Rosemary: It's not nice to see
[00:01:50] Allen: It's not good. And what, what does that, because there were wind turbines,
[00:01:54] Allen: maybe a quarter mile away that weren't affected at all. But there were, in this particular case, there were like three that were closely grouped together and they were. Blades blades down the towers were there, then the cells looked fine, but what causes the blades to come apart like that?
[00:02:10] Allen: Is, is it the twisting motion? Is it over speed? What, what, what does that to wind turbine blade?
[00:02:18] Rosemary: Yeah, I guess it's, I mean, primarily over, over speed. And it could be that there was some, you know, turbulence and sudden changes in direction. From the pictures that I can see, it looks like the upwind and downward sides are two, you know, halves of the blade shells seem to have been separated from each other.
[00:02:36] Rosemary: And, you know, once that happens, even in a small, small part of the blade, then yeah, that is definitely game over. Cuz you just got no stiffness anymore once, once the two sides detached from each other. So yeah. I mean, I have to assume that there was some, I mean there was so many blades affected, right?
[00:02:52] Rosemary: That it must have exceeded the design. Yeah, the design load.
[00:02:57] Allen: So the, the blades, if, if you haven't looked at a blade before everybody, but the blades are actually built, typically built in as two pieces and they're, they're glued together. How STR in the, in the airplane world, when we do things like that, we, we put a couple, we call chicken fasteners in.