In this episode we discuss research that showed a 70% decrease in bird deaths when just one wind turbine blade was painted black—is this a real effect or do we need to do more studies? We also go in-depth discussing vortex generators for wind turbine efficiency, and whether they actually live up to the 1-3% AEP claims made by companies that sell them. We also discuss WhalePower and whether a turbine blade design inspired by the humpback whale’s dorsal fin can make it to market.
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EP25 Full Transcript – How Do Vortex Generators Work, and Do Black Painted Blades Save Birds? Plus, Whalepower wind turbine blades?
All right, welcome back. This is the uptime podcast, episode 25. I’m your cohost, Dan Blewett. And I’m joined here by. Lightening protection expert, Allen Hall, Allen, how are you? Dan, uh, just another crazy busy week in wind turbine world. Uh, so when he got on the list of news for the week, well, to start off with news, we’ve got some bird strike, uh, mitigation techniques, old ones, old school, AKA paint, um, where it’s talking about a barrage of a lightning in Oklahoma, which I’m curious on your take about this because obviously.
You know, a lot of climates, pretty conducive, delighting somewhere, not so much Oklahoma doesn’t strike me as one. That’s crazy, but maybe I’m wrong along here. Um, and then our engineering segment, we got some more animal inspiration. So whale power, so well inspired leading edges, which is really interesting and unique.
And then we’re also gonna talk about vortex, generators, bunch and internet of things, devices that can help detect faults in the field. So. First let’s talk about, uh, let’s, let’s talk about Oklahoma. So 30, 30,000 strikes, uh, within eight miles or flashes. So I know there’s a difference there, but what did, what was your take on this story out of the Washington post?
Um, why such a barrage of, of, of lightning strikes and maybe because of the Washington post doesn’t. See a lot of weather like that, but the Midwest particularly between, so if you know your geography, like a sort of mid middle of Kansas South, all the way down into Texas, um, and even a little bit further North and in Nebraska can be really, really huge thunder storms.
I mean, I mean, tens of miles of thunderstorms and if the. If the weather is right and it’s hot and you’ve have enough fuel in the air. And it starts to usually come in from the sort of the Colorado New Mexico area, it starts to build up and yeah, and look out, uh, or in this case, West, Texas, you know, it starts building up and you can get these huge storms if they start to churn and that, and it happens at the right time of day.
You get these gigantic hailstorms, which, and then in terms create all these lightning strikes and that is not abnormal. I think we’re just paying more attention to it now. But if you ever, if you have the opportunity to drive through the middle of the United States and wonder all the trees are that they’re all the trees are small young.
You don’t see old trees there it’s because the hailstorm. Wipe them out. If they get trees of any certain size they’re going to come down. And at one point years ago, this is probably five ish, 10 years ago. Now once you start to hit with a huge. Um, hailstorm and just wiped out all the little trees just completely devastated the city.
So this is not unusual. I think the number of, and likes to be able to count them as unusual but 30. Was it 30,000 lightning strikes is a lot of lightning strikes that’s within, uh, within eight miles of, uh, Oklahoma university is Norman campus. So. That’s insane. So when you say this hailstorm wiped out all these trees, was it the hail itself?
When you’re saying like the lightening effects of such a storm, just the hail, just the hail is there’s so much hail coming out so hard, so fast. It just started breaking trees, big trees, just breaking them down, uh, and ice swarms too. So you get, you’ve had, um, a combination ice storms are bad there too.
You’re at the right. See this you’re just in right. Latitude and in the United States where ice accumulates. So, uh, Wichita has had some bad ice storm Shula just taken on all the trees, like, uh, no to destroy the trees and the, it just a combination of the, the proper temperature, the proper timing and the way that the it’s essentially flat there.
So once the storm get going, there’s nothing really stop them. Like there is on the East coast, so you get, start building bigger and bigger and bigger, and it just. Boom. You just get these torrential downpours and these huge storms that are amazing to see. They’re scary. Actually it looks like a black wall is headed toward you.
And that’s what it is. It’s a black wall yeah. Of rain and dirt. And, uh, lightning is coming your way and you want to get out of there. And that’s where the tornadoes. Perk up too. So you’re right in the middle of tornado territory there. So it’s not surprising because the winds get, it just gets fed. You know, I just, it just sucks all the air in, spins it up in the air, fills it full of gunk and drops on you.
Yeah. Scary. That’s crazy. Well, speaking of, um, you know, nature and the effects of the environment and wind turbines, so obviously birds bats, all these little creatures. They’re on everyone’s list of her tech is, you know, from these wind farms, obviously there’s the noise, but there’s also the blades themselves.
So this story, uh, it says basically like even just one black painted turbine blade reduced, um, bird deaths about 70%. So does this surprise you that just something, this simple and potentially this obvious would make such a big major impact on the wildlife? I mean, that seems crazy. Yeah. You would think that you would paint them all.
When did you, when the obvious answer be like to have you seen, obviously you’ve seen the winter and blades, which there’s like sections that are painted red and white, and usually that’s around airports and where planes are flying, but, uh, Just painting, want a different color, changes the mix there in terms of bird striking, it doesn’t make, doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Does it? You’re a senior. If you ever look on the, in the inland of an engine, you got that little on that’s where the little cone is on a jet engine. Today. You sit a little spiral, they painted on it. That’s supposed to be like a little strobe device when it’s in the air. And then just start of spin it it’s it gets for OB.
So it’s crime. It’s strobi strobing is supposed to keep birds away. I don’t know how birds are going to keep away. If the airplane is flying at 500 miles an hour, and you’re just a bird moving at five miles an hour, right? What are you going to do? Hope it’s not going to be any effect, but, uh, supposedly it does.
And I kind of wanted a similar, similar thing. It’s like a strobe, like, because only one of them is painted that it’s like a strobe effect. That’s like. Boom bump as it spins around. And it kind of almost the difference in color indicates of something or says seem predatorial like a predator or some sort, because why would a bird care?
Is it the whole thing? Doesn’t make any sense that doesn’t. And did you see any explanation of why this not the one blade? No. I mean, it says they had a small, it wasn’t a huge group, either. Like a, I wouldn’t call wind turbine a subject, but on the birds wouldn’t really be subjects either, but. Uh, but it says in 2013, there were four turbines in the test group that had a single blade painted black.
And the three years that followed there only six birds, uh, found dead by comparison. 18 bird deaths were recorded by the four on painted control turbines. So I don’t know, not a huge you’d want to a much larger sample size, I think to have. Really good data here, but yeah, they don’t explain why just the single blade was black, because I was thinking that if they’re all black, then they’re just, they have contrast with the sky.
Yeah. It could be what it is exactly. I mean, especially on overcast days, they’re going to London pretty well, but. Well, there’s a while now. And there was a while there where the thought was to paint the blades black, to help with, to get ice off the blades basically make them warmer when it’s cold outside.
Right. And so you saw that several years ago now. Very little. I’ve seen very little, that pretty much all the blades are white. So when it’s you just don’t want heat and blades, that’s usually a bad. Mojo there. So they don’t paint them all black and they do other things for the ice today. But it’s a similar to the bat, a repellent system where you’re using a ultrasound to push the bats away from different areas.
Uh, that that’s a cool technology, but that has research behind like a lot of research behind it. And. A lot of study by people who know bats. This, this seems like a really just like an introductory study that maybe need a little more research, uh, because to paint or to think about it. I mean, there’s tens of thousands, a winter and blades, hundreds of thousands, wind turbine blades across the world that for painting every third blade black or whatever color it needs to be, uh, It’s a lot of work.
It’s just a lot, just a lot of work. So I’m not sure that makes sense in terms of, is there anything else that could repel the birds because bird deaths are important. It’s just, what’s the most effective. Yeah. And you wonder if, I don’t know, they could just start to do these things as they roll off the factory floor.
Like you’re going to install a hundred different turbines. Can we, you know, use 30% of them for a study? Can we just factory paint? You know those 30 black, no, it doesn’t seem like that’d be too big a deal. It’s not gonna affect aerodynamics. It’s not gonna affect anything except the way they look, which, you know, maybe not that big of a deal.
I don’t know. We could start hot pink neon. Like you never know further study. You need to check different pink colors metallics, right? Well, it is, this does bring up an interesting point, which is when you started thinking about the history of things that for example, humans eat, how did we ever discover the coffee was like good to drink?
You know what I mean? Like how do you even know any of these things until you test it? Like maybe. Orange orange wind turbines are like the way to go. Like animals could just recognize them and avoid them at all costs. A lot of these things that you can just, you couldn’t test every iteration of it, but lots of times it’s just by happenstance where you’re like, Oh, we accidentally did this thing.
I accidentally ate these beans off this tree. And I accidentally roasted them and made them into a brew, which again, like how we had ever been ever, how we have some of the things that we have is just, is baffling. Like people just had to try it, try it once, but, well, yeah, but you never know, like, it should be lots of little things.
Like we’ve put a couple of little like mirrors glued to it, whereas just like deflective, reflecting a little bit of sunlight, right? Maybe like signals, birds, where they see it. And. You never know. There’s lots of little ideas that if they went outside the box and really were just tinkering almost, maybe they’d find just by happenstance, some strange solution that actually it’s like, why didn’t we think of that?
That seems obvious now, but I don’t know. Yeah. Cause the pain, the paint seems like a very fundamental, easy thing to change. But yet they’ve all just been only white for forever with some exceptions, but even exceptions. There’s a reason for that. You want to keep the plate, you don’t want thermal differences.
Large stromal grading has to be built up in the blades and heat added to, uh, composite structures. Isn’t good period. Yeah. So, you know, white provides a baseline average temperature and controllable. You understand it and it helps you be able to see, Oh, let me give you the negative side of a painting things.
Black. If you take a light and you strike. It’s been a lot harder to tell it on a black blade versus a white blade because the lightning strike leaves certain dirt and other stuff behind you. Won’t be able to see it. Right. So there’s other aspects to the color that are not necessarily intuitive to people who are studying birds, but to the engineers that are sitting behind the desk, trying to make these things go.
I, I would guarantee you haven’t been in those sort of environments. There will be a hundred reasons why they will never paint them black. And one reason why they would like to paint a black. So it’s that risk reward sort of thing that what needs to happen here? Like, okay, we save some birds, but. Uh, you know, the reason the white is, so the blades don’t fall off.
Okay. You know what? We need to weigh that out and figure out are there other means of making it happen, but it is a cool data point because you need, you need to pick up that, that data point and say, Oh, maybe this is something that we can, it’ll pull it in a different way and get the same result. Right.
Yeah, I think that’s the part about it.
so we’re going to jump to our engineering segment here and talk first about whale inspired blades. So this is really, it feels quirky, but it’s definitely not like, obviously there’s a lot of. Pages out of mother nature’s book that had been taken and the air dynamics world. Right? So like the, uh, the trailing edge serrations are out of, you know, the owls playbook, essentially like the fringes that help, you know, smooth airflow on the trailing edge.
And so, um, and doing some of this research, I found whale power. So this is a company that they have, uh, I guess, patented. The tubercles that are on the leading edge of a humpback whales fins. So these like bumpy and they look super on aerodynamic. I mean, when you think of aerodynamics, you think of like sharp, smooth blades, not like big knots, but yeah.
Um, Allen, how do these tubercles work on a, uh, a whale power tube, tubercle technology turbine blade? Like, what is, what is the technology there? Well, it’s essentially like a vortex generator. It doesn’t work exactly the same, but it’s similar. Yeah. In terms of what the result is, which is you want to control.
In the case of a whale were water flows, right. So they essentially have big wings, flippers, uh, and that you can the I using for a little bit of propulsion, but mostly just kind of like a submarine to go up down left. Right. So, if you think of, of whale having wings, that’s essentially what it is. And you want to be able to control the flow of water over those things so that you can steer all the time, even in high angle of attack situations.
So in like a fighter jet aircraft, uh, you want to be able to make that aircraft highly maneuverable. And so you want to control the air over the surface of the wing or the fin and high angles of attack. Right. So in a, in an aircraft situation, you wanna be able to turn the aircraft up, like go straight up immediately and get out of the way of an Emmy fire and a whale situation.
It probably wants to turn very quickly to go get the food, right? The food source to squid or whatever it was trying to grab. So, uh, being agile is very important for our large creature, like a whale. And in order to do that, you have to have very, uh, Active, essentially active control surfaces. So unique control of the airflow over the surfaces all the time or the, or the water over the surfaces.
And then while you do that, as you sort of trip the, the water, the, the flow over the entire fin. So instead of water sort of separating from the fin, you’re keeping it rolling over it, which allows you to provide the force. You need to make a quick turn for such a large creature. There so much away in aircraft works or ship works or submarine works that worked for, but the, the thought process of the same always control.
If you’re controlling where the water or the airflow goes, you always be in control of what’s happening. And starting, you know, being a writer, uh, an artifact of nature, you can, can actually control nature a little bit. So evolution here is play a little bit of a, of a, um, selection process where it probably the more agile gets fed better because the things you’re trying to eat are getting more agile.
Um, so it’s, uh, it’s an interesting technology, right? Um, very soon. Yeah. You, like you said, it’s like similar to the Al feathers or, um, G to a number of like, uh, this, if you remember the swimsuits, the Olympics, when suits from a couple of years ago that had that sort of roughened surface, which was similar to a shark or a dolphin, and like a shark has sort of like a sandpapery surface to it, which makes it glide smoother.
It takes less. Uh, energy to propel through the water and we’ve stolen a lot of those things over time, as we realize how they work and then, you know, we implement them and make our word a little bit better. Yeah. So it is, I wonder how they came across this concept. I mean, who’s, who’s studying whales well like that, I guess somebody is, I think that really was, yeah.
The guy just think was interested in studying whales and. You never know where inspiration comes from, but, you know, I just think it was, it was something innocuous. I remember reading the story, but I can’t find that at the, at the moment, but, but yeah, I mean to think that again, what looks really. Not aerodynamic is actually very aerodynamically efficient is just really fascinating that because again, like you look at a humpback whales, they don’t seem, they’re not like dolphins, right?
They’re not like sharks. They’re not like manta rays. Like these really streamlined creatures, like not at all, but yet when you start thinking of how they move through the water, it’s just really interesting. So obviously, you know, will this, do you see this being adopted potentially? And I don’t know the viability of this company right now.
They’re a little bit. Hard to find there’s a bunch of research articles or articles about them. But beyond that, it’s, it’s hard to tell how active the company is, I guess is a good way of putting it. Um, but do you see this being like a commercially viable thing it’s possible? It is possible. So there’s a difference.
Uh, between it’s just because I was having this exact same conversation this last week about, uh, uh, one of the products that we’re developing is the concept is awesome, but the implant implementation of that concept, it has to be just as good or better to propel it into some sort of marketplace. Because if you can’t communicate the message, if you can’t demonstrate that it works, if you don’t have any sales, it’s just going to fall flat in his face.
And the hardest part about. Any of these technologies, uh, the cerated trailing edges, the vortex generators, all the stuff is until you demonstrate it, you can get it in service and you can sell some of it. It’ll never really take off. So in a sort of a larger business sense, you gotta drive the sales to, to push, um, the, the comps at Ford.
Otherwise the marketplace won’t. Ever see it as real, right? So they’re the, the early, you need those early, um, people to take the on who are a little more adventurous to try it and to implement it and to show that it works, you build some momentum there, then you get the, that sort of the doubting next group.
That’s maybe the doubters a little bit. That will try it. And then, you know, you kind of work your way through those groups, but sometimes some of the best ideas are left at the ground level at the entry door, because you can’t convince somebody else to, to try it. And it’s hard. I it’s it’s, you know, we we’ve gone through that process a couple of times here at wildcard of, of having a new product and, uh, finding some early implementers and try to work.
Through that, but you know, in their case, it’s, you know, they’re having some man, it sounds like they’re having some management issues and personal issues, personnel, personnel issues, which, you know, adds to the level of difficulty of trying to get the product in the marketplace. But it, once it gets exposed, And other people can see it and have they patented this thing, she kind of wonder how much value that patent has and where somebody else will pick it up to see if it’s worthwhile.
A lot of times I’ll give you from the insider’s point of view on the engineering side. So if I’m working at a, at a, at a large. Wind turbine company or an aerospace company. And we hear that there’s some cool concept out there and it’s been patented. The difficulty is for the large companies, is that you don’t want to want, you don’t want to infringe on the patent because you’re gonna get sued.
But another other point it’s like, well, we could probably invent something so much of that, and it’d be less money than buying the patent. And. A lot of times management will go down that pathway because involves less. So, so, Oh, you know what? The technology is really good. And this in this company has a really key technology.
The chances that somebody buys the technology from them, or I think are usually relatively low, uh, just because there’s. Other human beings involved on the other side, who are working for the larger company that says they have pride too. Like, wow, this guy can invent it. Why can’t that’s something better?
And that’s the pathway they go down. So sometime these early ideas, it’s sort of like Edison and the light bulb. And the thing about Edison was he actually made the product. I’m not sure Edison would be famous for inventing the light bulb, unless he let’s say made the product. So like bell and the telephone, like.
Belden and make a telephone. Will we know Bell’s name? Probably not there. Their claim to fame is that they made an industry off of their idea. That’s the harder part here. And I, I do think that when silver market is particularly difficult to penetrate, because you have such large players over a long period of time.
So, um, You know, we’ll have to, we’ll just keep an eye on and see how it goes because the technology is cool. Yeah. So we’re going to shift back to more air dynamics stuff. What I want to quickly talk about, uh, one of these fault detectors. So, you know, and there’s a bunch of devices like this out here. This isn’t, this is just one of them, but this pink monitor is a battery counter battery powered device mounts directly to a turbine’s tower.
And, uh, so what are these typically monitoring? What are they going to tell technicians? So this it’s a cool concept that essentially it’s a bolt-on device or magnetic device. It kind of sticks into the tower and it’s got a little solar panel on it, and it has a way of communicating to the rest of the world.
And it’s just a listening device. So it’s got a really sensitive microphone attached to it. So you picking a vibration off the tower part of it, and then you pick it up blade noise. And you build up a sort of record of what it sounds like. It’s like a wedding and the physician listens to your heartbeat and you know, they listen for a couple seconds to try to get a sense of.
Is it beating normally. And then they’ll try, like, see if there’s something that is grief, a skip, a beat, or there’s a double beat or some something abnormal happens while the same thing happens here where they’re listening, listening, listening to a good blade system or a good turbine system. Cause it listened to the NSL and everything aside of it to generators and they get to get a baseline.
And if that noise ages substantially, it can send out information about. Hey, this sounds like generator, bearings. This sounds like a blade is broken. This sounds like you got some loose bolts somewhere so they can sort of predict what the failure mode is that they have an issue, but what the failure mode is and where to go look by the noise that it makes.
So from a, one of the things, if you’re having an add on system to a winter means you don’t. Want to interfere with how the thing works, right? So you don’t want to have to plug into their system, put wires into their system, connect to the system because you can affect the way that that wind turbine operates.
When you start connecting your stuff to it, or you can create failure modes that you, that weren’t envisioned in actually cause more damage to the turbine, then help. Right? So the concept is right where they don’t have any electrical, really Emilia and electrical connections to the turbine itself. Uh, and they’re just monitoring from the outside, but you like.
Putting a human being outside and say, Hey, look up there and make sure that wind turbine is working right. It’s sort of a similar several of that. It’s got a set them ears that they’re using to listen to the turbine, which is an interesting way to do it because a helicopter is used as sort of similar thing.
It doesn’t work just like that. Some are helicopters, have a system, at least more modern helicopter have a system where they monitor for vibration. So is everything spinning in a helicopter. Those things are rattling, shaking aircraft structures. And so the listen for changes in vibration frequency or amplitude that may indicate have some sort of failure and then send a signal out to them to maintenance group.
Like, Hey, I think the rotor blades loose or already got a turbine issue, or you got a gear issue or something of the sort, and somebody will look at it, which is. Obviously on the aerospace side has saved lives. That system saves lives and the same thing can happen here in winter. Ms. It can save you a lot of money long term, and it seems like a relatively simple thing to go.
Do, have you, have you seen that implemented anywhere? Dan? I know I’ve kept an eye on, cause at this, this company is based in Australia, right? It makes a technology. Have you seen an implement anywhere? I haven’t seen a lot of images. I know probably in Australia, they’re probably a pretty good corner of that market that I went to a market, not in Australia is not huge, but relative to the country, it’s pretty good size.
Um, so I wonder if it’s more of just sort of demonstrating an in country and trying to expand the growth out to other parts of the world still. Yeah. Uh, it says they’re operating in the field that there’s 150 on their way to U S wind farms. So it sounds like it’s something that’s, uh, starting to expand its reach around the globe.
So do you think it, what did they give an example of what, how much that system. What the cost is for that system. Cause it seems like it’s a simple kind of stick it to the tower. Yeah. It doesn’t seem like it’d be overly expensive, but I’m sure just like anything it’s, there’s probably some subscription fees to monitor it.
Have, you know, the cloud software, like stuff, but that’s my guess. So, you know, with all those like lower cost devices today, they’re always attached to some sort of recurring revenue stream. So that’s kind of what I would assume would be the case here. What would this thing be? Uh, I’m thinking of, uh, sort of the Danny Ellis guy, speck of the drone inspections, because they can do drone inspections of wind turbines so quickly.
Right now, is this something that would then is a, is a thought that this system would. Ping a sort of a sky specs to go out and take a look at the, at the, you know, to look at the turbine. One of the things that Danny was talking about is having sort of sky specs on site, having drones on site at different wind turbine farms to go look like, would it be an automated system where the pink system says, Hey, we got a, we got an issue on this turbine and the sky spics drown goes up.
Yep. Sure. Here we go. Boom. Up it flies and scans it and sends the data off to whoever’s looking at the data as an automated inspection system. Is that, is that kind of where this is going? This is, it feels like that. Yeah, it seems like that. Yeah. Cause obviously there’s gotta be some implication of. Okay.
We can monitor stuff. We just don’t want to monitor it to monitor it. So, you know, how can we integrate this with other technologies to say, okay, we’ve got this rumble, which we’re pretty sure is this thing needs attention. So let’s, what can we deploy quickly to do that? But yeah, it seems like that’s the future at some point where you just have all these things on site where it’s like, okay, This monitor says, deploy the drone boot.
I hit a button remotely, the drone deploys does it’s auto scan of the thing and then sets itself back down. I mean, that seems like that’s the future, right? Maybe I hope so. Wouldn’t you say that’s the future I would think would be obviously seems like it. Yeah. I want to be able to push a button and then a drone.
Like it goes and does my dishes for me. So it’s, it seems like the way for all this stuff. Right. So then human’s going to get even busier than we are. So we have all these things that make our lives actually not less busy at all. So that’s it. Okay. It’s going to make us more busy. So the drone is going to make us more busy whole side by side note, whole side note.
But yeah, we won’t go down that rabbit hole. Um,
so let’s shift gears, vortex generators. So this is a one of these power curve upgrade technologies that are really simple. Uh, but can make a pretty big difference as far as efficiency, this one company smart blade. Um, and there’s a couple others that, that, that sell install these, but they claim a 2.1% average annual energy production, uh, increase over a hundred test turbines.
So what does this technology do? It seems very simple, like little stick on, you know, poxy in place, kind of a, um, mostly made a thermoplastic vortex generators, but. What’s what’s the air dynamic tech here. It essentially trips the air. That’s what it’s trying to do. It’s if you think of it as being like a little shark fan, it’s actually usually two shark fin.
So they’re sort of pointing into the airflow or, or crosswise to the airflow a little bit. And what happens is the air is like a fence. Think of it as a, a fence. It’s kind of. You said of the airflow. So the air actually I should to tumble over the fence. Um, if certain we ever see a snow fence out in, uh, out in the wild, in the Midwest or snow fences all the time, there’s no fences for, for similarly where he you’re actually tripping the air a little bit.
So you don’t have big buildup of snow. Uh, the vortex generator. Takes the air that’s coming across the front of the blade trips. It makes it tumble and spiral and keeps it against the blade surface. Otherwise, if you didn’t have the vortex generator there, the air would sort of separate off the surface of the blade and create less power in turbulence’s loss.
So you want to. Get the air flow back on the surface, particularly on the inner third of the blade near the hub. Cause that that part of the blade doesn’t generate much power. Most of the power generator, the outer two thirds. So if you can get some additional power out of that inner third of the blade by controlling the airflow and forcing the air onto the surface that increases your power production.
If it knocks it up by a couple of percentage points, like we were talking about. In aging blades, how the PR the power production dropped by roughly half to 1% per year. She, if you can get a one to 2% increase by basically peeling and sticking on these little plastic, uh, shark fin type devices of Arctic generators.
VGs then. It’s a real simple mod to do. We’re going to do it. And I’ve, I’ve seen them more and more and more, uh, 3m makes, uh, I think three teams involved in some of these things where the, they just Bailey peel off. It’s just a peel and stick 3m, double sticky tape to the blade. And it works, uh, on the inner third of the blade peel and stick can work on the inner third of the blade because the blade speeds.
If you think about it, the blade speeds at the tip, or like, 180 to 200 miles an hour at the hub. They’re on their fraction of that. So there’s not a lot of, you can do a lot, all the different things I know to make things sticks. You don’t need a pack, seasons, complicated things down there. You can basically peel and stick these vortex generators on.
But the key to all of it is controlling air flow. And not only do it to the top surface, right? Because the top surface, like when you think of a wing, the top of the wing is curve in the bottom of the wing. It’s flat, winter and blades are very similar to that. So as the airflow comes over the top of that wing surface, it’s where it wants to separate.
Once it gets about to the middle of the cord and wants to lift off and just go tumbling all off. While these four text generators sort of force it back down and create the power that you otherwise couldn’t get. So it’s a relatively simple technology it’s used in all sorts of industries. If you watch formula one, race cars have them aircraft use them.
A good bit, uh, anything that’s aerodynamic and moving in relatively high speeds. We’ll have vortex generators for controlling the air flow. So the thing for a winter is that they’ve been using a more and more and more to get that power production back up. So as they lose production over time, they can.
Put some add ons. This is, this is this serrated edges. This is a vortex generators. This is the winglets to bring to power back up again so they can maintain maximum power output, uh, for longer of the blade and winter and lifetime. So it’s cool. So let’s talk about the, the root of the, uh, of the blade. So.
Why is that so poor air? Is it just cause because it’s more round and it’s gotta be a little more robust just to, you know yeah. Right. It’s it’s carrying a load and the air speeds aren’t high enough. So, if you think about it, um, you use the outer, it blades gotten longer, longer, longer. It’s the same reason.
So as, as the blades get longer and longer longer, even though the towers hadn’t really changed in terms of the height, you have more interface with air, which means that at lower wind speeds, you can reach production, power levels. So over time, over the last 10 ish, 15 years. So what’s happened is the towers haven’t gone any higher.
Essentially the blade diameters had gotten bigger to intercept, more air and therefore produce more power. Uh, so it just the way that the physics are, um, w the inner hub of the blade, isn’t moving across the air nearly as fast as more of a drag thing, because Moshe powers up now to two thirds. So as you make the blades longer, generate more power at lower speeds, all.
Plus, plus, plus you just don’t get that sort of at low speeds, power generation on the inner third. This is moving that fast. So, um, it’s not an acceptance as much air. There’s a lot of different dynamics. And you know, one thing you had talked about early on, on another earlier podcast was, you know, as, as, uh, we start to think about not in an individual turban producing power, we’re starting to think of each, uh, as a group of turbans as a system.
Same sort of thing. Right. Um, the they’re they’re thinking about not necessarily putting the, each wind turbine directly into the airflow because it made our fear with it, with the term behind it, but it may want to tilt them slightly, a couple of degrees left or right. Same sort of thing. Right. So there, uh, I, I was thinking about this over the weekend.
Uh, so I was watching a little bit of formula one, which. I can’t really S racing. Yeah. I can’t really watch it anymore because the person who starts at the pole wins all the time and nuts. They’re not great drivers. They totally are great drivers. Yeah. But we got into a point in civilization where we have enough computing power to determine the aerodynamics of pretty much anything.
And it’s aerodynamics that tends to, and somewhat power, but aerodynamics and engine power that tends to win those races regardless. So if you don’t have the best aerodynamicist in the world, you lose those races. Regardless. So if you’re not spending millions and millions dollars in the wind tunnel to make the, and that’s why the formula one race cars look so weird because they’ve got, you know, these team of aerodynamicists full time.
That’s all they do is work on aerodynamics of the car and the spinning wheels and everything else. That same sort of technology being applied to wind turbine. So you’ve, you’ve gone from, if you look at wind turbine blade designs, 10, 15 years ago, they’re much, they look rudimentary. Compare it to what they have today.
And you see all these other little things being applied to these older blades to bring the bypass, because now we have the computational power to predict where we can make improvements to the blades and the new, more modern blades have all of them. coming with the serrated edges, right. To come in and out of the factory because they add that much a lifetime and power generation to the winter and blades.
So. We’ve sort of reached this plateau and it makes racing awful to watch because NASCAR’s say way in the United States, it’s the same thing, same thing where aerodynamics has placed system on a part and they have to control every single part of the car. Because if a little bit of aerodynamic improvement makes you the winner of race after race, after race, um, the same thing is happening that sort of computational power is being applied to other areas.
Aircraft fighter, aircraft, military aircraft. Definitely. So aerodynamics, there are crazy computationally and same thing’s happening in, in the winter ministry where we have the computational power. You can be at your desk, really complicated, computational aerodynamics that you couldn’t do 15, 20 years, years ago.
And it’s changing the way we do. Everything in terms of wind turbines. Uh, because now we know, was it a podcast or two ago about GE hooking up with a, a supercomputer, right. You can can imagine now that we’ve gone from. I’m basically copying aerodynamic wing designs off of airplanes to now designing our own wing wings, essentially turning blaze based on the aerodynamics and the particular location where this blade may be installed.
So different parts of the world may have different. Shape blades because they are dynamics and the types of wins and the peaks and the, and the lows of valleys or the wind and weather in an ocean condition, or somewhere else may change the way they want to change our dynamics to maximize it for your particular application.
Very similar to LA formula. One racers are, are maxed out for the environment in which the racing in. So it’s a different mindset now than it was. Silver a couple of years ago, two, three years ago, even totally different because the copy of depiction of power is so available and the software is so good that we can do things we couldn’t have envisioned of a couple of years ago.
It’s, it’s an amazing evolution of computational technology. It really, really well. And when you think about 1%, you know, most people in our everyday lives, do you think like, Oh, 1% of like my heating bill going down. It’s not a big deal, but one, 1% on one of these 12 megawatt turbines is really a lot, especially over a 20, a 20 year span, you know, it’s huge.
Yeah. And it’s the same thing for formula one, race cars, footstool for formula one where he’s cars having a one mile an hour difference, right? Because those cars going 200 miles an hour. So a half a percent is one mile an hour. One mile an hour. Difference will win you those races time after time after time.
Uh, if the race has any length at all, same thing as this on a wind turbine, because we’re talking about such high levels of performance, that little incremental gain over time makes it huge differences. And this is where the marketplace comes in. Where if you can show that your blade’s going to be generate more power over a longer period of time, you’re going to win in the marketplace.
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