This week we discuss Keystone Tower Systems’ spiral-welding technology, which should speed up the construction process and drive costs down. The US DOE likes the sound of that. Meanwhile, Modvion’s wood laminate towers also have high-profile investors (Vestas, among others) but Rosemary says steel is more sustainable. Find out what’s good, and what’s still unknown, about both tower technologies.
Stephen Steen of Poseidon Systems explains how debris monitoring discovers potential failures that vibration monitoring can miss. With more than 10,000 installations, Poseidon’s database delivers intelligence that operators can use to get gear boxes fixed or replaced while they’re under warranty. Some OEMs are incorporating the information in new designs, too.
Visit Poseidon Systems here – https://www.poseidonsys.com
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Stephen Steen: You know, we can get a really good understanding of what’s happening within that care box from early stage faults, all the way to late stage faults. And so overall that gives us a great opportunity to detect. Relatively early, um, when things are starting to fail and actually track severity of that fault over time as well.
Allen Hall: Welcome to the uptime podcast. I am your co-host Allen hall and I’m here with Dr. Rosemary Barnes and Joel Saxum. We got a really event packed
Joel Saxum: show. So we’re gonna talk about two, uh, emerging tower technologies, one to do a spiral, welding, a technique borrowed from Newland gas industry, and then also laminated wood towers, uh, being built up in the Scandinavian countries.
Allen Hall: And then we have a guest interview with Steven steam, vice president of sales and marketing with post site and systems. And he’s gonna talk to us about debris detection and keeping your gearbox running. And
Rosemary Barnes: we’re gonna talk about whether Australia is about to face a skill shortage for workers to drive our really fast energy transition.
Rosemary Barnes: And finally, we’re gonna talk about a portable winter turbine that you can take put in a backpack and take camping with you to charge your devices. All right, everybody
Allen Hall: first topic for the week. Spiral welding of wind Turine towers. And now I, I saw this discuss probably a year, a year or so ago, and it went absolutely nowhere.
Allen Hall: Like nobody in the press picked it up. I, I did some, actually a little bit of deep diving on this company. It’s called Keystone tower systems and they have developed sort of large scale spiral, welding. And Joel, you may be more familiar with this, uh, work coming on oil and gas. Uh, you ever seen spiral welding where they make pipes and things like that that are spiral welded together real quick and dirty.
Allen Hall: Yeah.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. So, yeah, absolutely. But think about, uh, I guess this the E most easy way to think about this is, uh, you ever seen a seamless rain gut? Yeah, sure. Machine. Yeah. Right. So when they have, they have the stock steel, they have the trailer, they run the seamless gutter thing and then kick it out. Right.
Joel Saxum: Right. Of course it’s a different process, but it same concept on, on site. You’re bringing in stock materials instead of a classical pipeline. Um, building is truckloads and truckloads and truckloads of 40 foot pipes, 40 foot pipes, 40 foot pipes. Right. And then that’s, you know, heavy, there’s a lot of, uh, you know, a.
Joel Saxum: Combustible materials used to, to create those, a lot of hydrocarbons burn to, to make it. So it’s a little bit more efficient to do it on site that way. Um, so yeah. Uh, you see it, um, of course, anything, any, any place that’s logistically challenged? Uh, it works well. And, um, so yeah, well, I like to see the concepts, uh, The oil and gas to wind.
Joel Saxum: Right, right. That’s I, I harp on that all the time. Like this, the technology’s there. Why aren’t we using the same kind of stuff? So, uh, kudos to Keystone tower systems. I hope it all works out well. Yeah. They have
Allen Hall: a 7 million, uh, grant from the us department of energy, which has helped them develop this technology.
Allen Hall: And the key is there’s one machine that creates towers sections. And so they can make a tower twice as tall, 10 times, 10 times faster than a conventional tower. And because you can do it on site. You’re just bringing the raw materials in, you’re not shipping these large tower sections via truck, as we’ve seen in some of the more recent news stories where the trucks have tipped over carrying these tower sections, all that kind of goes away.
Allen Hall: Yeah. So they’re gonna have, create a factory on site where they’re putting up wind turbines and just spiral. Well, these towers together now, the, the, I think the real key to this is who’s involved. GE mm-hmm is involved, who has also been involved with cobot on making concrete pads and maybe even concrete towers.
Allen Hall: So GE has working with Keystone and Keystone has about 75 employees at the moment, but they’re working on the first spiral welded tower for a 2.98 megawatt GE wind turbine, which is that a Sierra wind turbine. Joel is that is three megawats is Sierra, is that what they call that?
Joel Saxum: Um, I mean the timelines tie together, but I can’t say for sure.
Allen Hall: Okay. So the insulation is supposed to happen later this year and it’ll be the first spiral welded wind tower in commercial use. So the question is, if we were talking about getting taller towers, it sounds like this is a really good way to do it. Rosemary. Isn’t that the point try to get higher up in the.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Um, I mean, it’s great. If you can get up higher, you reach higher wind speeds that way. And the power in the wind varies with a cube of the wind speed. So you know, you a little bit, a little bit more wind speed and a lot more power. Um, and at the moment with traditional tower manufacturing methods, it’s really limited by how, um, you, you know, you’re limited to a certain diameter of tower, but you can transport.
Rosemary Barnes: On, you know, normal trucks on normal roads. Um, if you wanted to make a, a taller tower, but you can’t increase the diameter, then it means you’re gonna have to really increase the, the thickness of the, the tower. So you use a lot more steel and yeah, steel is expensive, especially these days and it’s energy intensive, right?
Rosemary Barnes: So if you can build it on site, then you can build whatever diameter makes the most, most sense for your structure. So I think, um, yeah, this is one of it. There’s a few different ways. People are trying to be able to get away from, you know, that limitation of, um, the tower diameter you can transport. Um, so yeah, another way is people are building like scaffolding at the, the bottom up, you know, kind of like, um, they build part of the tower and then they Jack it up and build another part underneath it.
Rosemary Barnes: And Jack it. Um, but to, to be honest, a spiral welding sounds like a neater solution and it’s more, um, similar to, you know, existing tower structures. So we’re not gonna have to start again with, you know, all of the validation of, of is this, you know, are there surprises when you make a, a tower in this way?
Rosemary Barnes: So of course there will be some, um, validation phase, but I wouldn’t expect huge something huge surprises. So I, I think it should be able to, you know, roll
Joel Saxum: out pretty quickly. I like the idea of, uh, the DOE being behind this thing as well. Right? The department of energy’s behind it, they got some, some funding and some money in there because, um, of course we’re always looking for how can we lower the levelized cost of energy and wind?
Joel Saxum: How can we get it more competitive with everything else? So if this is the, uh, the, the little injection to get a company moving to drive down that cost and spur on some more develop. I’m all for it. All right. Keeping
Allen Hall: on this tower theme wood towers. So mod Vion, which is based in Sweden and Rosemary, I’m sure I have murdered that name.
Allen Hall: It’s probably something much more Swedish than that, uh, is working with store Enso to use laminated timber, uh, to build when turbine towers. So if you go onto the website, it looks like they’ve laminated multiple layers of. Board together, basically stinged them, curled them and bonded them together. It looks cool.
Allen Hall: Right? So if you, you have a chance, everybody go check out their website. What mod beyond is saying is that their towers will last 25 to 30 years. So it last, probably longer than the wind Turine will last, but they’re significantly lighter than steel towers. And they’re joined together with glue instead of metal bolts, which.
Allen Hall: Doesn’t feel right to me, Rosemary, I know you’re the composite set expert, but without having some bolts there, the mechanical engineering part of me, just kind of cringes a little bit uh, but they’re, they’re using Scandinavian spruce for its wind turbines, which is, is a renewable wood source. And on their website, they also say that they can reach 150 meters tall with these towers.
Allen Hall: Does that even. Okay. So just stop there. Rosemary, does this make any
Rosemary Barnes: sense at all? Oh, kind of. I mean, wood is nature’s composite, right? It is a composite material. Um, you’ve got the, you know, the fibers surrounded by, you know, some kind of NA natural, not my trademark. I always get credit for coining terms that I, I have not coined on this show.
Rosemary Barnes: But yeah, I, this is one of my, my favorite sayings. Yeah. Wood is nature’s nature’s composite. And I mean, you see, you look up on the internet, you can see all sorts of things made out of wood. There’s plenty of, of bikes like mountain bikes or, or road bikes or whatever, like a million people have probably by now made their own bamboo.
Rosemary Barnes: Um, Framed, um, bike and yeah, it works because it’s, it’s similar to, to composites. You could definitely make a, a wooden winter turbine blade. If you wanted to. I mean, you can make wooden boats or they make bike boats outta fiberglass. So, um, yeah, there’s, there’s nothing really wrong with it, but it is a natural material.
Rosemary Barnes: And so it’s variable. And like, for example, in wind turbine blades, they used to use a lot of Bolser core. And I mean, a lot of manufacturers still are, but most people are trying really hard to get away from it because it’s a, a variable, it’s got variable properties, you know? Yeah. Um, Quality to control is harder than it is with something you like steel, um, which is pretty, pretty easy.
Rosemary Barnes: Um, and also, you know, supply chain, um, is not so straightforward because you know, you’re dependent on nature and I don’t know, Bush fires. Um, do you call ’em forest fires in, uh, in other countries that, you know, can cause problems. Um, would technically, yes, it’s a renewable resource. It can be depending on how you do it.
Rosemary Barnes: And I know that plenty of people would strongly disagree with a statement that the know the Swedish, um, timber industry is run sustainably. Um, they are definitely still logging some, um, native, native. Forests or, you know, areas of, of trees. And a lot of people disagree that they’re, you know, managing the existing ones sustainably and that we could, you know, do, do a lot more with them.
Rosemary Barnes: Um, yeah. Also not recyclable. You would, you know, I dunno what you would do with it. Do with it afterwards. Maybe you can tread it and make plywood or something. I’m not sure. Um, I’d assume so. Yeah. Yeah. So I don’t imagine that this is how wind turbine towers are gonna be made in 10 or 20 years time. Um, I think it’s cool.
Rosemary Barnes: I, I could definitely appreciate that. It’s like a cool, you know, hipster, handmade, wind turbine. Like that’s nice. I’m sure it looks lovely. Um, make the blades out of wood too. Um, and then it would look really, really cool. Um but yeah, I, um, I don’t see that it has a lot of advantages E even for the environment, you know, I think that probably steel is a.
Rosemary Barnes: Long term sustainable solution for, for the towers.
Allen Hall: And Joel, you know, that plywood in America has really shot up in the cost big time. Right. And this is essentially layered plywood. So is, is it, is the cost. I think that the cost gonna be the, the major constraint here.
Joel Saxum: Well, there’s, you know, using them as in, as part of a circular economy is definitely viable.
Joel Saxum: Right. Cause they could be, I mean, a lot of places are even heating with wood pellets in the us. Right. Right. I mean, that’s a very, very common, but they could be ground up use for that. They could be used for OSB, all these things. So, but I think there’s just like, like, uh, Rosemary Stanley, a lot of variables here.
Joel Saxum: Right. Um, they’re using spruce and Scandinavian countries. That’s great. Well, Spruce like that doesn’t grow in very many places in the world. True. Um, you know, the Pacific Northwest, uh, fantastic. Uh, you might have some up in Maine here. I’m just talking to the United States. Right. Um, so those and that type of tree is very, uh, flexible.
Joel Saxum: Right. And they’re very fibers, so like nature’s composite. Right. Um, so that would work well for it. Um, I have seen these, these exact same type of, uh, laminated beams in industrial. Settings actually in Northern Wisconsin, um, they use them for power poles in some places. Oh, wow. So you’ll see. Yeah. So sometimes you’ll see around like a corner on a highway where there used to be a bunch of the, just the old school cylinder poles.
Joel Saxum: They will have, uh, some of these laminate beams that are, um, uh, for the power lines, but they’re, uh, In a rectangle shape, right? Yeah. So that they hold their, um, mechanical properties against the way to the way to the line. Right. So this they’re, they’re being used in industrial, uh, settings. Um, and that, you know, that when those got installed, people were kind of looking like that’s pretty, exactly like silly.
Joel Saxum: Like it looks like the inside of a cabin. Like that’s nice. um, but, but, uh, there’s also some things to it. I guess my, some of the things that pop up to me be outside of the supply chain and, uh, you know, it’s nice to get away from steel costs, but then trees and whatnot, hurricane seasons and stuff in the us driving lumber prices differently.
Joel Saxum: But. I worry about the insurance risks of these things, right? So you’re talking, Nael fires now, a Nael fire is an entire tower fire, right. Um, or, you know, what are we looking at for, um, lightning strikes, uh, LPs systems now have to have ground conductors all the way the ground. Like, it’s just a, there’s a lot more on the insurance side that, that kind of peaks my mind, but I’d have to agree with Rosemary.
Joel Saxum: I don’t see this being the, the way the industry goes. Cool
Allen Hall: project. Well, we’ll have to just keep our eyes on it and watch how things develop, because we’re gonna see a lot in technology and towers. Just a question of which ones is gonna come to the forefront. So after the break, everybody, we’re gonna have a guest interview with Steven St.
Allen Hall: He’s vice president of sales and marketing with Poseidon systems, which is based the United States. And they do. Debris monitoring or wear detection of gearbox and other things. And they have some really cool technologies. So after the break, Steven steam was
Stephen Steen: item systems.
Stephen Steen: Ping monitor is a continuous blade monitoring system, which allows windfarm operators to stay ahead of maintenance. Wind techs can often hear damaged blades from the ground, but they can’t continuously monitor all the. They also can’t calculate how bad the damage is or how fast it’s propagating based on sound, but ping can Ping’s acoustic system is being used on over 600 turbines worldwide.
Stephen Steen: It allows operators to discover damage before it gets expensive and prioritize maintenance needs across their fleet. And it pays for itself. The first time it identifies serious damage or saves you from doing an unnecessary visual inspection. Stop flying blind out there. Get Ping’s ears on your turbines.
Stephen Steen: Learn more at ping monitor. Dot co
Allen Hall: Steven. Hey, thanks for being on the program. Uh, I appreciate you coming on up time. Great. Thanks for having me, Steven. You’re the vice president of sales and marketing at Poseidon systems. And Passid is a, a leader in real time monitoring, particularly for debris in gear boxes. So can you just gimme some basics of what the Poseidon gearbox monitoring system does?
Allen Hall: Yeah. So
Stephen Steen: our core capability is really around the metallic debris that comes off during, you know, when gears and bearings start to fail. So, uh, we’ve designed a sensor that. Best in class, it’s able to detect all the way down to 40 microns. And, uh, what that allows us to do is we insert that into the gearbox lubrication system.
Stephen Steen: We take a small flow from that system and, uh, pass it through the sensor and we’re able to get a distribution of sizes of particles, uh, for Ferris and non-fat debris. So, you know, really what that allows us to do overall is, um, you know, we can get a really good understanding of what’s happening within that gear box from early stage faults, all the way to late stage faults.
Stephen Steen: And so overall that gives us a great opportunity to detect relatively early, um, when things are starting to fail and actually track severity of that fault over time as well. There’s a lot of systems
Allen Hall: that the OEM will deliver with the gearbox. Typically you can get a vibration monitoring system with that.
Allen Hall: What is the difference? And I’m trying to understand, like, what is the difference between a vibration monitoring system and a debris monitoring system? What, what are the similarities and
Stephen Steen: differences there? Yeah, vibration’s been around for a long time. It’s a pretty, uh, uh, sophisticated and well known, uh, system.
Stephen Steen: In fact, within wind. What they call the condition monitoring systems analogous, just saying the vibration system in reality, there’s actually other technologies that would fit underneath that paradigm of condition monitoring. So one of those would be wear debris. That would be one of the, uh, systems that’s part of a condition monitoring system for that wind turbine.
Stephen Steen: Um, but again, just cuz vibration’s been around for so long, it’s relatively adopted within the system. CMS typically to most people means vibration. But this all comes down to, what do you consider a catch? You know, what is it that you believe, uh, is, uh, early enough understanding of what’s going on within the system that you can get the outcome that you’re looking for?
Stephen Steen: And a lot of the times. Because condition monitoring is defined by vibration. It catches what is the vibration system able to do with different sorts of faults? And so what we try to do is kinda realign to, well, what, what would a catch actually be for a planetary bearing? Do you wanna know a week before or a couple weeks before it’ll go catastrophic.
Stephen Steen: Or do you wanna know a couple months before? So you can start to figure out what is a, you know, what’s gonna happen? What, how severe is this? Do I need to start planning right now? Do I need to maybe bore scope in a couple weeks, a couple months? Do I need to derate, do I need to take kind of different actions to optimize that wind turbine?
Stephen Steen: So when you look at the two systems, um, vibration systems are getting a lot better at detecting planetary faults. And a lot of the, um, vibration companies would claim, you know, high detection rate, a catch rate of these faults, but then we go back and say, well, did did that one week warning give you what you needed to, to properly plan for that issue did allow you to replace that gearbox with another gearbox when you already had the crane on site, if you would’ve known earlier, Or whatever that might be.
Stephen Steen: So when you change what that definition is for catch, it really allows you to kind of go back and, um, look at the benefits of the different pieces. So when you look at vibration versus, uh, wear debris, we think both are very important to the monitoring of, of winter turbines, but, um, What you really lose, or you don’t have with vibration is the severity understanding of how bad is that fault.
Stephen Steen: So since we’re directly measuring the actual debris coming off of that fault, that gear, that bearing whatever it might be, um, how fast it’s happening and is it getting worse? Is it, is it losing faster that amount of debris. Really how bad is it? And do we need to act now, do we need to act later? So this idea of slow progressing faults versus fast progressing faults allows us to kind of get that, uh, understanding.
Stephen Steen: And really it, it’s kind of, uh, relatively easy to know if it’s a, if it’s a bad fault. So this weekend mother’s day I’m out. I get an alarm on my, my phone and I was able to pop it up. Look at the graph. It was a shut down alarm. So it was just an auto end of an email to a customer to shut down the turbine.
Stephen Steen: Cuz when let’s say gear. Comes off, you know, it’s a lot of very, very distinct as opposed to, there’s just a signature there that there’s a problem we can see if that’s a little bit of, you know, pitting on the gears versus an actual throne tooth or what that looks like. So you get this better understanding of what’s actually happening and how fast that may need to happen.
Stephen Steen: And, um, again, one of the differences that we do. Are able to do with our sensors, cuz it has that lower detection threshold. Um, some in the industry actually see that as a negative because they have been kind of inundated with, well, we don’t want any false positives. And one of the things that our sensors able to do with that, with that lower detection is, is a little sensitive to foaming.
Stephen Steen: and it will look like they’re small particles, but because we have so much data, uh, we have almost 8,000 turbines worth of data and growing every year. Um, we don’t see that as a negative. We see that as positive cuz we actually know exactly what that foaming event would look like. And now you can see in some cases where the oil levels low enough, it’s starting to foam.
Stephen Steen: We have a, a trigger that says it’s the foam event, a low oil event. They can go, they can add oil to the gearbox and eliminate the foam. Conditions that are happening within that gearbox. Meaning now we’re, we’re doing preventative things. And so things that you wouldn’t be able to do without the sensor we’re able to do now with, with, with these sensors, because of, uh, the ability for us to use all the available data from the sensor, with a, you know, large number of turbines to kind of build these different sorts of detections.
Stephen Steen: And so. Um, as new failure modes come about, um, a couple years ago, slipping races, uh, kind of hit, hit the market across. And, um, we were on a handful of turbines that started to see a high, high, high speed slipping outta race and, uh, vibration system. Wasn’t seeing it, other things weren’t seeing it. And we were seeing it because of our much smaller detection capability down to that 40 micron.
Stephen Steen: We were able to see these bursts of small. right around certain sort of events. And we were able to take that time series, even though only one of the turbines hit our thresholds. We were able to actually pick up a secondary turbine at the same time was having the same events. They were able to go and pin those bearings.
Stephen Steen: And so when you talk about those early, I gotta N one failures, the first ones that people start to see if it’s creating debris, we’re gonna. And, and so there’s not a lot of debate that there’s a problem. Um, we may not necessarily know what that problem is, but we’re able to actually see it and go out and start taking care of that.
Stephen Steen: And so, um, that just because it is a lot easier to understand, and it is a direct measurement of the damage being done. It does take out a lot of the guesswork. Um, again, as of the weekend, just picking up the phone, seeing the alarm, being able to, you know, text the customer real fast before anything, uh, you know, negative happened and they were to go out and take care of.
Stephen Steen: um, didn’t require somebody to sit there and analyze the data real in depth, on a vibration system, to try to determine whether or not that sort of threshold is important for an, you know, a near term emergency, it was automatic or first response. We know what those levels were and, uh, they were able to act on it.
Stephen Steen: So
Allen Hall: in inside of a gearbox, what’s the typical kind of failure then? Is it a more gradual failure? Failure? I know the ones we always hear about are the immediate catastrophic, because. Raise the most concern with everybody, but do most gearbox just gradually, gradually, slowly degrade, and then go off that ramp of to, to some sort of significant failure in and how soon can you really start to detect.
Allen Hall: Hey, this gearbox six months
Stephen Steen: from now is gonna have a problem. Yeah, there’s sort of the standard failure rates, which, you know, they kinda say a bearing spa kind of worked its way over a handful of months, six months, eight months, nine months, uh, from that initiation and more traditional failures of, of those bearing.
Stephen Steen: But in some cases it’s such a surface level problem that it starts real slow. We’ve seen. A detection two year and a half years before it got to that catastrophic level. And so what’s nice about that is cuz you have that two year window maybe necessarily. You’re not going to do something other than confirm that that problem’s there.
Stephen Steen: Um, now the question becomes, when is it so severe that you have to do something? You either send borescope people up every three months and spend that money or you wait for that debris to get a certain level. We’re able to say, you should actually, now you need to go confirm it. Cuz if you look at it, you’re gonna see some more severe damage.
Stephen Steen: So because we’re measuring the debris coming off of that fault, as it gets to certain levels, we know what that severity is. And that can take a very long time on some of these bearings balls. Again, we’ve seen these and a half years, three years.
Allen Hall: Yeah. And so how does Theon. Analyze the debris data that’s coming back.
Allen Hall: Is there something on the turbine itself? Is it getting pushed up to the cloud and then analyzed on a server somewhere? How do what’s what’s going on behind the
Stephen Steen: scenes where you can’t see it? Yeah, it’s pretty flexible overall. So we have this, the, the sensor itself, which is, you know, collecting the, the raw data, the particle counts and that sort of thing.
Stephen Steen: And that’s getting sent up to. The SCADA system typically, and then shared back to Poseidon, um, through an API. So we’re, we’re typically the, the owner operator, the OEM is seeing the raw data. They’re able to have some, maybe some emergency alerts in their system, and then we’re doing the more in depth analyzation in the cloud into that.
Stephen Steen: And so we have an edge device. That allows it to plug in to the site network. And then there’s a couple different ways to then collect that data. Um, hopefully in an easy fashion, get that data back into the cloud where we do that analysis that we just talked about. So in, in that
Allen Hall: analysis, because you said you were like on 10,000 turbines, so that’s a lot, a huge sample set.
Allen Hall: Uh, if you’re analyzing data on the cloud, then does that then allow you to compare that data. So if I’m out in Kansas somewhere, can I look to see if, you know, uh, seeing turbine in Ohio kind of does that data kind of get collected together to say, okay, this turbine has this kind of failure at about two years.
Allen Hall: This one in Kansas is starting to, to, to head that way. Is, is that some of. Uh, uniqueness of the data that you can, that you have, that you can
Stephen Steen: actually correlate those events. Yeah. Some of the data that we try to get up front when we do these installations is configuration, uh, metadata. So what’s the turbine type.
Stephen Steen: What’s the gearbox, uh, type and model, um, that allows us to obviously then look at different makes and models with known failure modes. Um, so we have this metadata database in the background. That helps us start to correlate. Well, we’re seeing it on this gearbox, on this wind turbine type, uh, from this year, right?
Stephen Steen: This, this batch of gear boxes. So we can start to then get a good idea. Okay. Well, it’s this bearing supplier. And when we see these bearing suppliers on these gear boxes on this known configuration, we can. Start to get an idea of, okay, this is the typical failure mode, which gives us a little bit more confidence and insight to what the recommendations would be as well.
Stephen Steen: Um, so we can then go, okay, well, on this particular gearbox, we typically see these sort of bearing spas, these issues within that system, going back to the slipping bearing issues, it was a very. Specific configuration, very specific type in our database. So we knew which ones to kind of turn on that algorithm to do those detections.
Stephen Steen: And those can very much look like a gear to fracture, which is just, you’re not producing any debris. And then you produce an, uh, ridiculous amount of debris out of nowhere and, uh, triggers all your alarms. And, you know, you try to have to figure out how quickly do I need to act? Is it a, is it a chip tooth?
Stephen Steen: Is it a full tooth? Whatever that, that might. Based on these different levels, but because they can look a little bit similar between different gearbox, uh, manufacturers, as well as different ones, you try to get an idea what those failure modes are from that metadata. So you can say it’s okay, they’re two different wind farms, two different locations, but it’s the same supplier.
Stephen Steen: Therefore I should start to see some of these same failure modes. And without that metadata behind it, you’re really not gonna be able to do that sort of analysis.
Allen Hall: Wow. That’s, that’s amazing. In a sense then if you do have something cause an alarm, if you’re going to go up and look, you have a pretty good idea before you get there.
Allen Hall: What you’re looking for, this is not start searching around on, on the gearbox, looking for everything you actually can pretty well pinpoint where you need to be looking and just put a Bo scope on it, lay some eyes on and say, yep. That that actually happened. We did lose a tooth or we do have a, a waist way that’s wearing away.
Allen Hall: We need to go fix it. So does doesn’t that. Life a lot easier on the operator.
Stephen Steen: It seems like it would. Yeah, it certainly does. Especially knowing when they need to go up and do that. Cause a lot of the times, again, with these other systems, you know, that there’s something wrong, you just don’t know how bad it is.
Stephen Steen: So did I waste a trip to do a Boro scope? Um, there’s a lot of the questions that we we deal with. And so, um, having a better insight of. how bad is it? Where should it be? You know, what am I looking for? Allows the borescope, or obviously to kind of focus in on what that is. But two, if you think about it, end of warranty inspections, they send a borescope out to every single gearbox.
Stephen Steen: The question is why would you spend hardly any time in a gearbox that showed no debris whatsoever? There’s no debris in the system, then there’s nothing for them to see if they do a Bo scope. And, uh, versus another gearbox, which may have a lot of debris. And so you can then start to also say, okay, we may still do all the borescopes, some cases, the only borescope turbines, where we have enough debris that you visually should be able to see a problem.
Stephen Steen: In other cases, at least you can focus the borescope or to say, do a quick one on this one, but spend an extra hour. If you have to, to find the problem in this gearbox. So when you’re doing those end of warranty claims, you can go back and say, okay, well, we, we found the problem. Here’s the image. Here’s the debris from the Poseidon system, showing that it’s a severe, uh, severe problem and it’s escalating or it’s accelerating to a fault really gives you some weight behind that, that you.
Stephen Steen: In some cases probably would’ve missed. So if you’re relying on, let’s say the OEM vibration data, um, not being a third party, they’re giving you information. Um, there, there there’s a there’s conflict of interest, whereas we don’t have that. We just, here’s where the situation is here, where we see the problems.
Stephen Steen: So if you go and you look at these turbines, spend some extra time to make sure you get the pictures of the damage, and then you have. So we need ease of mind, ease of, uh, uh, focusing on where you should putting your resources. It’s very, very good at really focusing where you need to be focused on. Oh, that makes, that makes
Allen Hall: a lot of sense.
Allen Hall: So if, if I’m an engineer and I’ve got a hundred turbines and I’ve, I’ve got the system on and it’s measuring debris and all these turbines, what am I looking at sort of day to day, week to week? Is is the cloud interface showing trend lines. So I can actually watch things happen sort of live. And, and I know when that next service period comes up, I can, I know I’m gonna need someone out here looking at these specific turbines.
Allen Hall: Is it, is it that sort of thing? So I can, uh, plan ahead. Is it really just kind of a straightforward. Screen, what,
Stephen Steen: what am I looking at here? We try to make it a lot easier than that. So we don’t want the customer to have to interpret a lot of the data to determine what they should be. So we have very clear criteria based off of the wind turbine, make and model of here’s, what we put in a critical category versus a medium versus a low, and those categories have.
Stephen Steen: Here’s our recommendation. So there’s a shutdown category, which is shut it down. Go look at it. Don’t turn, return it to service until you visually confirm that you think you can run that machine versus in the next two weeks, you should do a Bo scope versus in the next three months, when applicable you do, you should do a Boro scope.
Stephen Steen: So there’s kind of, so these. Timeframe’s attached to ’em. So again, you’re optimizing that, that role that’s in more of a summary. Here’s where it is. Here’s where our recommendations are. Then if they want to dig into that data, they can, they can look at trend lines. They can look at distribution of the debris of where we think the severity levels are.
Stephen Steen: And with most of our customers, they actually choose to do our higher chair service, where we actually have a monthly. To review the data and have a discussion back and forth. So what are you seeing? You know, what are we seeing? Um, because there’s also some operations decisions to be had. Maybe they can’t get a crane out no matter what.
Stephen Steen: For eight weeks is not gonna happen. Okay. Well, we should probably have that discussion and I’ll talk about what could you do to optimize those eight weeks, get as much power production as you can, before you do that. Or our Bo scope broke. We just had that happen. So the, they we’re gonna go do Bo scopes.
Stephen Steen: It broke now that I have one on site, we’re not gonna be able to divorce scope for, for two months. So we really need to know whatever the, the timeframe is before they could do. What we need to do in that interim so that we don’t have any issues. So, uh, that higher tier kind of work with them side by side service seems to be very popular.
Stephen Steen: And, uh, we’ll actually do a, a monthly report with, with each site or, or region, depending on how they’re set up to talk about the worst ones. You know, what, what, what is the best. Decision moving forward. Um, and the, in the kind of the worst situation, they always have a priority list. They can start with with the general recommendations and, uh, they can work off that list to make those decisions.
Stephen Steen: We don’t really wanna have to have to dig in the data if they don’t have to. Yeah, sure.
Allen Hall: That, that, that makes a lot of sense. It makes it easy. Everybody’s got so much to do, trying to keep track of these turbines. if you could simplify it, it it’s the right way to go. So I, if you had a, a gearbox that’s starting.
Allen Hall: Degrade and, and, you know, at some point you’re gonna have to do some major service on it. Are there ways from sort of predictive side that you can. Do these things slow down the turbine, maybe avoid certain sort of, uh, operations that would extend the life of, of a gearbox, uh, a considerable amount of time.
Allen Hall: Can, can you have that kind of knowledge
Stephen Steen: base? Yeah, so we quite often, um, especially after a shutdown. Kind of command alarm. We do an inspection, take a look at it. Uh, we kind of know where those levels are of, of debris generation, where you have a high likelihood that it’ll go catastrophic versus at a safer level.
Stephen Steen: And so we use the, the sensor as a feedback loop to say, okay, well we really wanna optimize it. We think you should drop down to this D rate level. And then we use the sensor to confirm that that is a safe operational level where you’re not producing too much debris that it’s still accelerating up, but maybe it’s at least flat lined.
Stephen Steen: so it’s a more debris generation kind of using our, our database. And what are those levels? What do those look like? What’s the turbine make and model all that kind of feedback. You know, one of the first things we can do is optimize the D rate strategy around the turbines that can do that. Um, so that they’re still producing power as much power as possible, but still in a safe level where they’re not going to, you know, dramatically increase the risk of, of splitting the gearbox, having the oil dripping down, having the cost around.
Stephen Steen: And the turbine being shut down during that time period. Yeah. It makes a lot. It makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Or just from a preventative standpoint, too, if you can start to identify what events are causing those damage, um, going back and seeing, okay. Could we do things in these certain scenarios that, that, that generation of debris that damage being done can be avoided overall?
Stephen Steen: Um, now you’ve extended the life of the gearbox because you’ve no longer have these damaged conditions, um, within that system. And so we’re working with some, uh, owner operators on that as well as OEMs on how could you use that sensor to go back and identify? These are the conditions where we could do something a little bit different, uh, to then avoid and extend the life of those gear boxes, as opposed to just letting ’em run.
Stephen Steen: So,
Allen Hall: and, and like in a new turban situation, I just buy some new turbines. You can actually come to me. Before I even turn ’em on and say, these are some of the operations you need to. Right. Just based on that data
Stephen Steen: set you have yeah. On, on ones that we have information on and configurations and that sort of thing, you know, we can start to have at least a decent idea of what some of the challenges are up front, but, um, uh, there’s always differences again because of the supply chain and, you know, certain failure modes kind of creep to the supply chain that disrupt that what we’re really looking at.
Stephen Steen: Um, it’s a real great tool for OEMs on a design side, as they start to develop their turbines to use that as a feedback. All right. We, we put a new control algorithm in. We see what happens. We see where it’s going. We start to see an issue when we do these certain things. Okay. Let’s avoid that and change the way that we control the turbine.
Stephen Steen: That’s a
Allen Hall: really smart way of doing that. And that makes a lot of sense. And so when should a debris monitoring system be installed? I know a lot of, I, I think there’s a lot of, uh, operators that say, well, when the turbine gets older and really need to know what’s going. I’ll install it then. And maybe only do one out of every five or one out at every 10, but that doesn’t, that doesn’t really make a lot of sense based on what I’m hearing here.
Allen Hall: So when’s the best time to install a debris monitoring system to get your, your, your maximum return on
Stephen Steen: investment. Yeah. And that’s, um, one of the things that’s certainly to change is. Uh, OEMs are starting to kind of consider having these from day one. Um, so that’s kind of one change, but currently today there’s still quite a large fleet being installed that that will not have them.
Stephen Steen: And what we’re finding is within that first year, uh, there’s the early infant mortality. So if you have a two year warranty or three year four, whatever that is being able to see those early infant mortalities, the new failure modes that are starting to creep into the systems. um, to optimize that it’s a, it’s a nice third party check to the condition of those gear boxes.
Stephen Steen: And so most of our customers are being a less than a one year payback on detection and finding of these sort of issues under warranty, um, with the sensor so that they can go back and have a warranty claim. So we had many customers with installations. We’ve seen 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 gearbox. Um, warranty claims that otherwise they wouldn’t have known about, there was nothing in the vibration system.
Stephen Steen: Um, they wouldn’t spend enough time on the borescope to kind of find those. And so, because it’s just so obvious and if you have that. Early enough before the warranty period. And you can see that damage being done, you can classify how bad it is, confirm it with a Boro scope and really that’s your biggest payback.
Stephen Steen: You’re getting an entire new gearbox or a fixed gearbox, all paid for as opposed to saving money down the road when it does. Maybe catastrophically failure detecting a little bit earlier. So, uh, initially it was, you know, we’re feeling the pain, we’re feeling gearbox failures. We wanna put these in, uh, we wanna prevent that very quickly.
Stephen Steen: It became obvious that we could then see things under warranty as a third party with only the intent to find problems where there are problems. Um, really the payback ends up being, uh, much better under the warranty period. Wow.
Allen Hall: That that’s, that’s amazing. I I’ve learned a lot here today. the debris monitoring system is not my air of expertise, but I have learned a lot from you today and I really appreciate you being on the program.
Allen Hall: So Steven, thanks so much for appearing and, uh, hope to have you back on in your future. Yeah.
Stephen Steen: Thanks for having. Lightning is an act of God, but lightning damage is not actually is very predictable and very preventable. Strike tape is a lightning protection system. Upgrade for wind turbines made by weather guard.
Stephen Steen: It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory LPs. So you can stop worrying about lightning damage. Visit weather guard, win.com to learn more, read a case study and schedule a call.
Allen Hall: All right. Thanks Steven, for being on the podcast, uh, check out pose beside and systems, just Google ’em. They have a lot of really interesting debris and wear technology systems available, uh, on wind turbines.
Allen Hall: And like we talked in the interview, I think they’re on 10,000 wind turbines, which is quiet, a number of installations so that they definitely know what they’re doing. Next up. We’re gonna talk about Australia and Rosemary has been telling us for months. Now that they’re be, they are becoming a renewable superpower.
Allen Hall: The issue is, do we have enough people to be a superpower in renewable energy because they’re gonna need a lot of, uh, new engineers and technicians to support this renewable. Vestis in Australia and new, new Zealand’s head. Uh, Danny Nielsen has warn that Australia faces a renewable energy skill shortage, uh, that the climate commitments that Australia has already made require hundreds of thousands of skilled workers.
Allen Hall: And it’s a workforce that Australia doesn’t currently have. Now Rosemary, you being on site there, it does seem like Australia is really pushing his solar and wind. And another, a couple of other areas they’re talking about 400,000 jobs. Are, is there enough? Engineers on site and technicians to support 400,000.
Allen Hall: I don’t think that there’s jobs like that or, or is it just gonna be a
Rosemary Barnes: transition there’s not 400,000 unemployed engineers sitting around waiting, you know, with renewable energy experience. That’s right. Um, I guess at that surface level of analysis, then that is true. Um, I don’t know, it’s, it’s really common for businesses.
Rosemary Barnes: I don’t know. Maybe this happens everywhere, but in Australia, at least businesses complain that there’s these huge skill shortages and say that we need, you know, um, special, um, exceptions to immigration rules to allow, um, you know, people to come in because they don’t. My I’m more, uh, often an employee than an employer.
Rosemary Barnes: Right. And so, you know, my, my perspective on that is that they don’t wanna pay to compete with, for engineers against the mining industry, for example. So they’re like, oh my God, there’s a skill shortage. We have to allow heaps of immigrants, um, immigrant engineers to come in because yeah, we don’t wanna pay well to take ’em from another industry.
Rosemary Barnes: And we don’t actually want to support, um, students to go through university and, you know, have more people train in. Cause there used to be like a lot of things like businesses would sponsor cadet ships or something where, um, and, um, I know blue scope steel was a big one that, that did this. They would pay for you to go to university.
Rosemary Barnes: You’d do your summer, um, work experience with the company. Um, and when you know, you finished because they had supported you, you had to work for them for a certain number of years. And. You know, they get the workforce that they need in that way. And because they’ve got so many students that, um, they partnered a lot with Wollongong university, that particular company, you know, they had some say in what people were, were taught there and, um, made sure that they were really, you know, sure job ready.
Rosemary Barnes: Um, but that sort of is happening. Less and less, no one wants to actually pay to, to develop the, the workers they say they need, they just wanna bring them in quickly so that they can, um, yeah. Get them, get them faster and, and not have to pay as much money. So that’s their like cynical, um, you know, employee kind of perspective of it.
Rosemary Barnes: But, um, yeah, often, I mean, people will be complaining about skill shortages and they’re always complaining about skill shortage of engineers in Australia. And often I know a lot of people and good engineers who are having trouble finding work. So it’s not always like, it, it doesn’t always feel the same from, from their employee perspective as what it, it does, what the businesses are saying.
Rosemary Barnes: Um, I, I also think we have a lot of engineers. Yeah. They don’t have a lot of renewable energy experience, but the kind of engineers we need in Australia, like we’re not building wind turbines here, at least currently. Um, I don’t know if ster is planning to reopen a factory here and that’s the kind of skills they think they need.
Rosemary Barnes: But you know, if you’re just trying to develop, um, wind farms and solar farms, you need people with like construction experience and. Um, you know, like technicians and, um, all that sort of thing. And they can all come over from other industries, you know, like if you wanna train to be a winter tur buying technician, um, and you have been working in say a coal power plant, um, as a, you know, a fit or Turner for the past 10 or 20 years.
Rosemary Barnes:Â It’s not gonna take much for you, for you to, you know, you do a one week long GWO course, maybe you do, um, a blade repair course and within like very short number of months, you’re up to speed. So I think it’s funny to say we need renewable energy engineers. Like it’s some sort of magical engineering that you don’t get from a mechanical engineering degree or experience in a, a mine or anything like that.
Rosemary Barnes: um, yeah, I do see a lot more jobs. I agree. Um, on that point that it’s a great time to be working in the industry. There’s heaps of work available. Interesting work available, well, paid work available, but I definitely think it’s overblow on there’s, you know, hundreds of thousands of new new, renewable engineers that we’re missing.
Rosemary Barnes: What is a Turner? They make stuff out of metal they’re, um, you know, fixing fixing metal equipment and making new new parts for it. Yeah. They’re they’re milling. Um, they’re on the LA they’re. Yeah. Doing all those sorts of things. Okay.
Allen Hall: Joel, you, you made this transition from oil and gas to mm-hmm renewables that that happens pretty commonly in the United States, or is it still early
Joel Saxum: in that process?
Joel Saxum: You know, you’re starting to see it more and more, especially here right now. I’m down in Houston, right. And you’re seeing Houston has always had this. Hashtag energy capital, the world thing going on. Right. And now they’re starting to switch that gradually, uh, to energy transition capital of the world. So there’s a lot of really good engineers here and a lot of, uh, VC money starting to float in and a lot of really cool places like, um, you know, Greentown labs is down here now, the ion, some other stuff like that.
Joel Saxum: Really. Okay. So, yeah, so they’re start, they’re starting to grab more people out of that oil and gas realm. And at the same time, um, you’re starting to see a, a major shift, um, in, in the way, you know, we get energy as well. So people are wanting to go over to that side. So yeah, I, I made the transition for me.
Joel Saxum: It was a little bit more gradual because I was in the tech space and the technology that was work a lot of subs stuff. Right. So it was offshore, wind and whatnot. Um, but, uh, yeah, you’re you, the more and more you talk to some people. It’s it’s starting to change quite a bit here, engineering wise. I mean, and a lot of it crosses directly, right?
Joel Saxum: Um, technique, FMC, huge, uh, sub oil and gas, um, and construction company, top side, everything, they, you know, they build chemical plants and all this, but they’ve in, they’ve invested in, uh, Uh, a big win, the X wind platform. They invested 15, they own, I think they owned 15% of that now. Wow. Okay. Um, so they’ve, they’ve made the direct jump right into offshore wind, right?
Joel Saxum: So they’re the, the companies are starting to do it too. Not only just, um, startups and whatnot.
Allen Hall: Well, it sounds like it’s gonna be a very interesting future and a lot of jobs available the United States and it sounds like Australia. That’s great. All right. Last on the docket for this week, portable wind tournaments.
Allen Hall: We have all seen these little gizmo things that sort of produce some power are the ones you put up in your backyard that are maybe a kilo lot or so, but we there’s a, there’s a couple of smaller wind turbines that have been introduced to the marketplace. The one in particular that I’ve seen is, uh, from a Canadian based company called EIA technologies, a U R E a, that has sort.
Allen Hall: Yeah, I’m not sure that I’m pronounced that. Right. But the, but the wind Turman they make is called shine. And it’s about the size of a one liter bottle. So everybody has had a one liter bottle of soda knows sort about EA tall. Uh, and it, it is capable of charging handheld electronics, such as your phone, your tablet, some lights, L E D lights, probably some cameras weighs about three pounds and it has a.
Allen Hall: Watch turbine in it, but it’ll fit in your backpack. And it also has a battery in it, uh, a 12 amp power, lithium ion battery in it. So you can charge it up and it’ll hold that charge. So one of the keys to this roastary is it has patent pending high efficiency blades and a lightweight design. So it weighs, uh, it has 13 Watts per pound.
Allen Hall: That sounds pretty cool. And the pictures on the website are actually amazing. So you just starting your backpack. Walk through the woods. And then when you wanna make a phone call or watch Netflix, I guess you power up your iPad and using the wind turbine? Is it Rosemary? Is this something we’re gonna see more of this sort of portable wind generated?
Allen Hall: Charging systems.
Rosemary Barnes: Um, maybe, I mean, there’s quite a few around and I mean, it’s great. They’ve got patent pending on their higher efficiency blades, but I mean, it’s not, not a secret how to design a, you know, maximum efficiency, wind turbine blades. So I, um, I don’t give them any, any credit for that other than maybe, you know, something catch you on their website.
Rosemary Barnes: Um, it’s cool that you can fit it in a backpack. Sounds nice and light. Um, and. Yeah, you can charge your, your mobile phone or I don’t know, whatever else you want, low power devices. So that’s, that’s cool. Uh, it’s something that people ask me about every now and then, cuz there are a few available. So people, you know, get in touch to ask what I think about different ones.
Rosemary Barnes: And I have been thinking it would be a cool video to do, to, to get a bunch cause I go camping a lot. Um, so, you know, compare them also to, you know, like a portable solar panel, um, and see, you know, how much usable power do you really get out of it? Was one thing that has crossed my mind. Right. Is that like, when I go camping.
Rosemary Barnes: Pretty concerned to set my tent up in the least windy place possible. Um, so yeah, you know, it doesn’t strike me as an immediate, like an immediate, obvious way to, to get electricity at my, my campsite. Um, I mean, in Australia now, when you go camping, everyone’s got, um, you everyone’s electrified their campsite, which I find incredibly irritating, but you know, everybody’s got solar panels now.
Rosemary Barnes: And is that what.
Allen Hall: is that what they call glamping? No. you ever heard of that term? Is
Rosemary Barnes: that an American term glamping? No, I mean, it’s a, I don’t know. I think it’s a global term, at least I’ve, I’ve heard it. Um, glamping is like, you’re not on a camp mattress or a stretcher. You are, uh, in a proper bed. And, um, you’re probably, I.
Rosemary Barnes: With power. Yeah.
Joel Saxum: 3000, 3000 thread couch sheets. Yeah. You need a lot
Rosemary Barnes: of these wind turbines too, you know, probably power and power, the lights in a, a proper glamping setup. And you probably got a heater if it’s cold and you know, all this sort of stuff. Um, so yeah, but solar panels are very common and Australian campsite now for, for better or worse, but I have never seen someone using a, a wind turbine, um, to power their camp set up.
Rosemary Barnes: I would be keen to, to get a bunch and try them, um, and you know, do a, a review video. Um, I think that, you know, what’s gonna make the difference. Isn’t gonna be the efficiency it’s going to be, how reliable is it? Is it stable? You know, um, like when you got a wind turbine, there’s a big, a big thrust force trying to push the tower over.
Rosemary Barnes: So I, I would expect that actually your like tower design and tethering system. Would be the more obvious place where innovation is is needed and can make a point of difference. Um, yeah. So, no, it would be interesting to try them out. And yeah, it would say something, well, maybe
Allen Hall: shine will send you one or maybe they’ll E or aria.
Allen Hall: Is it aria? Maybe it’s aria AU R EEA guys. I think so. Aria, sorry. EIA is not the right term. Clearly aria we’ll send you a shine unit, then we can figure out what it is and how it works. And then, you know, you can put it on your engineering with Rosie. Yeah. YouTube channel, like get a hundred thousand views on the thing.
Allen Hall: They’ll be internet famous.
Rosemary Barnes:Â Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. No. Um, yeah, they should send me one and, and all their competitors should send me one too. And I can do a, a big comparison and made the, the best portable win turbine win.
Allen Hall:That’s gonna do it for this week’s uptime win energy podcast. Thanks for listening.
Allen Hall: Be sure to subscribe in the show notes below to uptime tech news or weekly newsletter as well as Rosemary’s YouTube channel. And we’ll see you here next week on the uptime wind energy podcast.
