Wood wind turbine towers: are they here to stay? Will they catch fire if struck by lightning? Is it worth it over steel? We also discuss battery technology, leading edge erosion and what causes it, and more.
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EP9 – Wood Wind Turbines & More: Full Transcript
All right. Welcome back. This is the uptime podcast is episode nine. I’m your cohost Dan Blewett. I’m joined here remotely by a lightening expert, Alan Hall. Alan, how are you? Hey, Dan, how are you? Crazy week this week, huh? Yeah, man, we were busy and, uh, DCS extended their lockdown until June 8th, so like longest in the world.
Uh, but till wait till when? June, June, June 8th, June 8th. Oh my gosh. Yeah. We’re going to be out of lockdown next week. Uh, and I, it’s sort of County by County a little bit, but I, I doubt that we’re gonna. Washington D C is unique because it’s its own entity, right? I guess so. And someone was asking me, they’re like, well, DC doesn’t have a governor.
Is it like, does the mayor have the power to do that? And I, I assume so. I don’t really know. Of course. Seems like all the governors are getting sued and losing anyway. So it’s like, I don’t even know what’s happening in our country. It’s like, okay, no one has the power to do anything. So let me go. Let’s go.
Right. Yeah. No, I think, uh. I was telling you earlier, listening to CNN is making me nuts. Uh, it’s just constant new, normal, new, normal. Well, when has society been a normal, I don’t know when that is. And reporters talking about new normal, it seems to me is. Just abs from an engineer is, and this is an engineering perspective on all this, there is no normal, because every day we’re trying to make the world a little bit better, or it’s changing in some way or another, and there is no normal.
So tomorrow is different than today as it was different than 10 years ago. So what, right. Yeah. I mean, I get that, but there’s, this is definitely some sort of new normal, like I have to wear masks to go in an elevator, like that’s not. That’s not normal to you use that term. Well, I get that. Yeah. Okay. So have you ever been in an airplane where people smoked?
No. Alright. Right. You ever been in an office where people smoked? No, I was right. You ever use a rotary telephone? Like what? The actual dial, you had to spin the damn thing. A millennial, you know that I haven’t, no. I grew up on Instagram actually. I didn’t tick down much, much on much past all that. Yeah, right.
Yeah. Yeah. All right. Fair enough. Fair point. Fair point. Right. I mean, I was in Seattle on September 11th things changed that day. We had a new normal that day. I had plastic silverware on my flight back, which had never had before. That was a new normal. Yeah. Every day. Every day is a new day, and the humans adapt.
If we haven’t adapted to the changing environment than we have been gone a long time ago. We’re not Dodo birds. We’re able to think through some things and, and you know, work through the situation we’re in right now and we will work through it and we’ll get back to some sort of a quote unquote normalcy, whatever.
That was great. Yeah. Right. I think we’re okay. Yeah. I’m just suffering from coronavirus talking about it. Fatigue. It’s like literally the only thing anyone can talk about. It’s becoming very obvious that we just, it’s so front of mind for everybody. Very, very front of mind. Yup. That’s crazy. But yeah, so speaking of which, as I transition out of coronavirus forever, I’m on the docket today.
We’re going to talk about w, uh, wood wind turbines, which is a pretty interesting thing. Obviously, not all of the circuitry, but you know, the towers, right? Um, and potentially blades. We’re gonna talk a little bit about, uh, leading edge erosion. And, uh, some of these newer wind turbines on flatland have a direct drive mechanism, which is interesting.
So, yup. And we’re going to talk about a little bit about a Ted talk. Let’s start with this Ted talk. So I was watching this Ted talk, uh, I should know the guy’s name, but I forgot it just now, but he talked about, uh, renewable energy for the future and what this looks like. Is it realistic that we can have so much of our energy, like essentially save our planet.
And his, I think main, main premise is that, Hey, we’re killing birds and bats. Solar needs so much land to be sustainable because the electricity, you know, the conversion rate of solar into actual usable electricity is still very low. That we have to basically just decimate tons and tons of land to do this, which is obviously bad for the environment.
Um, and then like natural features like using a hydraulic, um. Will using a dam as like a hydraulic pump? Is it describing that, right? Like you need certain features for that, even to work. So even some of these good ideas like that aren’t feasible depending on where, you know, the, the natural land feature.
So where do you fall on this whole thing? Do you feel like it’s a valid, that we don’t have a chance in this or what, what? We’ve been using hydro power since the 1920s. Uh, Niagara falls is one of those firsts. Hydro dams situations, and I think there was a competition there between Edison and Westinghouse and Westinghouse and Tesla one, and they’ve been creating power from that ever since.
So we’ve been in some sort of renewal numerable energy, uh, systems since the really the Dawn of electricity. The question is demand and be able to satisfy demand and to satisfy demand in a clean fashion. Solar. Obviously you can’t have all solar. We’re never going to be on a hundred percent solar. We’re never going to be 100% wind.
We’re never going to be a hundred percent oil or gas or hydro or even nuclear. That won’t happen because every in the United States, we tend to think of anything like that in the United States. Every countries is exactly like us. That’s not the case. We don’t have a lot of earthquakes. We don’t have a lot of type.
Obviously you don’t have typhoons. Um, and in certain parts of the country are pretty stable. And the United States, but there are applications where solar makes complete sense or applications where wind makes a lot of sense. And with the, uh, new advancements that Elon Musk is talking about on the Tut, on the Tesla battery side, then some of the solar wind applications in beget even begin to get more realizable because you can store energy with them.
Same thing for nuclear, right? So nuclear is advanced a whole bunch. And in your lifetime, in my lifetime, Dan nuclear has gone from, I don’t know. It’s, and the safety record is actually very good, but it’s deceptive to several of his big emotional response to it because the thing of the horrors, Chernobyl and the possibilities of how bad it could be.
And you know, three mile in the United States is the one that everybody remembers here in Chernobyl, over in this, in Russia, Soviet union. But. We’ve made a lot of advancements since then, and the next generation of of nuclear is going to be safer, more efficient, and be able to do things we couldn’t do 30 40 years ago.
That’s the evolution of society. So we need to constantly be looking towards the future and seeing what we can do now that we couldn’t do in the past and see how that fits in with everything else we’re doing. There’s a, there’s room for nuclear. There will be, and I think you’re going to see a lot of action, the, at least in the United States and to, to.
Try out some of these new systems it’s going to take, and when you develop a nuclear facility, it’s going to take, obviously there’s a lot of regulations involved there, and then just building the site. So you’re talking about five to 10 year process to get something cited. It’s a little bit different than, than a wind turbine.
And that was his, his ranging point was that nuclear needs to come back and that’s our most sustainable option. And then solar and wind just really aren’t. But I also feel like he jumped to, he jumped to conclusions. Just, I mean, just kind of making this quick leap from like, Oh, we’ve killed a lot of bats, therefore this isn’t gonna.
This is never gonna work or we need more solar. Nope. Like it takes so much land to get solar power, therefore this is never going to work. Well, solar is going to get more efficient too. Like you don’t need the same amount of space in 10 years that you do today to get the same amount of electricity, obviously.
But you know, percentages will still maybe be a fraction of what they need to be to really be sustainable without, you know. Harvesting so much of, you know, the desert or whatever. Yeah. There’s still a lot of, it’s a busy ecosystem, even though it’s maybe not as inhabitable as you know, we humans would like.
Right. I, I think of it this way, having more choices at the cafeteria of energy sources is better. So then we can make educated decisions for the places that we were at and having more, more ideas and more things thought through and more things tried. Is only be better for society longterm, and we can, and we can’t eliminate them.
We can’t eliminate them haphazardly, which is what we’ve done a lot of times. Like, well, solar’s off the table. No, it’s not off the table. Come on. Yeah. Right. Uh, if there’s anything we’ve learned with particular with Elon Musk and Tesla and all the things that are going on there is things we thought were off the table, we’re now back on the table in a huge way.
That’s why, because you know. It must never took them off the table to begin with. He just said, we just need to make some improvements to them and see what we can do with it. Everything’s on the table. It’s gotta be on the table. Yeah. Yeah. And battery been battery technology seems like it’s improving a lot.
And I was reading and watching some videos about, uh, what is it called? It’s a, it’s where you have your electrolyte in a, and it’s just, it’s a flow battery and they’re talking about flow batteries being one of these. Up and coming, you know, large scale storage, uh, potentials for, for, for energy. So Elon Musk, a lot of people on it.
Yeah, there’s supposed to be S there’s more, I think Musk tweeted something not long ago about some battery breakthrough that there he’s talking about. It sounds like it’s consortium with some companies over in China, but, uh, all the details haven’t been released. But the conjecture is, is that the cost of energy storage is going to go way down.
And it made me reach that magic threshold where it’s now worth it to invest in it. We’ll see. But it’s just like me. I’ll give you a good example on my end. Uh, I’ve had a battery powered lawn mower since 1995 or six. I haven’t had a gas. I never owned a gas mower. Okay. Why? Well, weird. Well, okay, so I, I’ve, I’m an electrical engineer, so I understand sort of the motor thing and how the batteries work and all that, but I never have to change the oil in it and never had to put gas in the thing.
It always starts, I’m never changed the spark plugs. I’m never worried about oil leaking in my garage. I never worried about it on a cold day, not starting, I don’t have to fix a carburetor and retune carburetors all the time. I have had put zero maintenance on a mower in 25. 25 years or so. Every time I got out there, it started.
Now that’s an application for renewable energy. It’s a battery power a lot more. It’s got a little charger on it. It is the most simple device. And when we learn from those simple devices, then we get to the next stage, like maybe a car, right? So we go from lawnmowers to cars, to airplanes, which is probably where we’re going.
But each of those steps has been an advancement. And I’m not sure it’s society has always grabbed onto the fact that there’s an, there’s a convenience to having a solar, a wind farm, or there’s a convenience to having a, a, a, a, a nuclear power plant. And we need to kind of get our heads around that and start making decisions, not necessarily based on emotion, but based on what the reality of the situation is here, what we would prefer, but what exists and then make that decision.
An educated decision on that. I’m not sure. We’re always making it from an engineering standpoint, we’re sorta making emotional decisions about our energy sources, not making the, the mathematical, how do we improve society the most and the way we improve society the most as we’re finding out is when people become electrified and civilizations become electrified, a lot of health improvements, food improvement, the whole society starts to improve.
So there’s a trade off. There was a trade off. I mean, we’ve been making that trade off for a hundred years. We’re going to continue to make it. Yeah, that’s an interesting point. How, how do you have a mower that’s 25 years old? Like what kind of battery technology did he even have back then? Let acid. Like a car battery.
No way that they actually were motor motorcycle batteries is what they were. They were motorcycle batteries. Yeah. Have you like replaced it? Like how, that seems shocking to me that something like that has lasted that long. Well, I actually replaced it recently in the last, about three years ago. I replaced that my original lead acid Ryobi L battery power lawnmower with a, um.
Uh, basically the home Depot brand of, of lawnmower electric, uh, battery power lawnmower with has a lithium ion battery in it. So the, it’s a huge step up. I know that sounds weird to talk about, but my, uh, lead acid battery mower, we go about 45 minutes, which is, you can do a lot of moan in 45 minutes with that Lithion ion.
It’ll, and my lithium ion battery is now self-propelled. First off, my old, my old wasn’t. So it has more power capability and it runs longer. So in that 25 year period, I went from led acid push to sell, propelled and running along to her. Yeah. And I just saw at all places, home Depot where they have a battery powered a lot more riding lawnmower.
So we’ve gone from push mower to self-propel to now battery powered riding a lot more, which is. It’s huge. Right? Uh, the one thing you want to get rid of is the, like the little two cycle, uh, blowers and all those things. Those things are burning oil all the time. It’s good to get rid of those things and go to something that’s a lot cleaner.
Electricity is a lot cleaner, particularly if nuclear power is the energy source or solar or wind or the, or the power sources for recharging those batteries. Yeah. Is yours like a, is it like a plugin battery, like the little family of power tools, or is it built in, no, it’s, it’s. Yeah, it comes out. So it’s a, it’s about the size of a, so you could have a couple of others and just if you run out, you just throw a new battery and keep going, which is what we do.
I have a couple of F two batteries, but that whole set, if you go to home, people home, people out of spots of this podcast. Today’s episode is sponsored by home Depot, which is actually, I think. Well, I think we talked about this, but Menards, if you’re in the Midwest, Menards is just, it’s such a great store.
It’s so much. It’s so much better than Lowe’s. Then Lowe’s and home Depot like theirs. Yeah. I won’t get into, but Menards close, close to my heart anyway. Yes. No, it’s totally true. My parents have a Menards back home when they rarely go to a home Depot unless they’re forced to, but home, the difference is when like.
When you’re, you know, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of times to buy the expensive tool, like the good tool that you’re going to keep for awhile. And then there’s a lot of times when you, that’s just not the case. Like you just need a cheap, quick tool and you don’t, you’re not going to use it again, or it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t last very long and you, you don’t get good options like that.
A home Depot, like there’s lots of times where you’re like, I just need these three little things. And you’re like. And you leave and you spent $35 and you’re like, this sucked. Like this shouldn’t have cost this much. Like, and then you go to Menards, you can get those same things for like nine bucks total.
Yeah. And they have like a good generic section. That’s an overall, their prices seem to be a lot more reasonable. And they, I don’t know, their, their model just seems to be very different than, than home Depot. Oh, is it? It’s a lot more helpful people to go at Menards. Yeah. Well, on the East coast, what I think is close to Menards is tractor supply.
You want to have a tractor supply. Yeah. They’re, they’re out there. Of course, there are this way, way smaller though, but yeah, there tend to be way smaller. They didn’t use to be way smaller. They used to be big in the Midwest and now they have sort of smaller stores. I like tractor supply because they have all kinds of tools and hardware and it’s not super expensive.
And there’s somebody, there has actually used a tool in their life, uh, so they have somebody who can actually help you find the client what you need. That’s a different place. So I buy all my hardware from, from tractor supply. Engineering tip of the day. Go to tractor supply. Yeah. Yeah. And it does vary.
Like I think Lowe’s is, is my, my bottom. It’s a very, it’s a cleaner store than like home Depot. It’s like more polished, but you know, and you find those old jobs are very helpful at all of them, but they seem to be more sparse in home Depot and Lowe’s. But yeah. Anyway, so, okay, so you’ve been. I mean in our other, in our other podcasts struck like, we’re gonna be talking about electric airplanes soon, so this shouldn’t be surprising that we can do a electric lawnmower.
We can’t, we’re going to put things up in the air with people in it. Then like, yeah, we should get lawn mower done first, landmark first, that right, weed Wacker, lawn mower, and then, you know, go-kart riding, lawn mower and Tesla, and then go from there. Yes. Well, and that would be a boon for like the, uh, you know, I mowed lawns for a little lawn care company.
My, my godparents, their son who’s, and he’s like, he’s like 10 years older than me, but I worked for him for a summer in his little lawn care company. And just thinking about at how many of his, you know, those professional mowers that are six, seven, $8,000 that are really powerful. You wonder if you can get to the point where we can, again, if like, if we could do an aircraft, you could do.
One of those lawn mowers, but you know, it’s talking about how much money and gas that would save him and oil and just maintenance and upkeep. To your earlier point about not having to change spark plugs, that would seem like a really big deal for the lawn care industry. Not to mention how much. Grass.
We’re cutting in America a lot. All of our lawn mowers became electric. That would probably be a really big deal for the planet and the United States. It would, it would be a big deal just because, you know, uh, the, even the, the, the blowers are the guys you see blowing the leaves and blowing the grass after they cut the grass.
A little, like a little two cycle, uh, powered blowers. It’s a huge deal. I mean, if we’re always, if we’re talking about trying to be greener. Then great. You know, it doesn’t have to always be the biggest thing you see. Getting, getting society to change their opinions about electric things starts at the consumer level and then it works and it works from there.
Right. If you, if, if a kid growing up today only knows. A battery powered mower. Then when they get to a battery powered car, though, it’s a lot more, they’re familiar with it, right? It took us a long time to get to a gas powered car and to figure out how to make those things work, and then the transition over is, is just as tough, right?
So it starts as a generational thing. It really is. You got to think of it like that. Of course, you know, it takes the least amount of energy is horses, so we just go back. We just need to get back on horses again. Good. We’ll be in good shape. I mean, we’ve, we just over-thought this whole thing. Let’s just go back to horses and oxen and then we’ll be, we’ll be all set.
Yeah. Yeah. So, so would wind turbines, uh, I’m looking at this tower here. So it’s a standing nearly a hundred feet tall. And this is an article on Bloomberg that we’ll, we’ll link in the show notes, but a hundred feets on the Rocky shore of the Island, B Yorko in Southwest Sweden. Um, so it looks like a normal wind turbine outside, obviously it’s paint and everything, but inside it’s a composite wood made of three to four millimeter thick layers of Nordic.
Groaned spruce, uh, covered in a waterproof coating. And they say it’s as sturdy as steel posts. So Al, what do you think about this? Is, this is an interesting idea because we talked about in a previous episode that there’s just a graveyard of huge fiberglass wind turbine blades. And this is talking about the, the tower, right?
Not the, not the blaze, but there’s a, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of waste there. So how do you do, what do you, what do you got on this? Let’s just back up a minute. So one of the most recyclable materials on the planet. Is steel. Uh, it just because you can cut it and reform it into something else and remelt it again.
Uh, so wind turbine towers are made out of steel, typically. I’m not sure what the benefit of this is, besides obviously the energy it takes to heat the steel up into processes. Steel is typically a cold power. Thing. Yeah. Uh, to recycle it. Uh, but you have a similar situation with wood. Look, someone’s got to go out and cut this tree down.
It’s got to haul it to the lumber mill. It’s got to be processed by the lumber mill. It’s got to be made into some sort of shape, and then it’s gotta get haul to the site and it’s going to get screwed on, nailed on whatever they’re doing to make this tower. Yeah. So, um, I understand using the renewable resource thing.
That’ll make sense to me. I’m not sure if it, what is the right answer and for, so that that’s just the recycling part of that picture and the energy usage. But the other half of this is. On the electrical side. And then the electrical engineer in me says, Oh, I don’t have any shielding on my power wires and my control wires that are running up and down this tower, because would provides zero shielding from a noise from lightening effects or anything else for that matter.
So how are lightening currents getting from the blade all the way down to the earth? And I might coupling a lot more energy into the wirings. The wiring system have to be cupping more energy in the wiring system, so I might actually have to put more work into this thing because the tower is now going to add on as something that’s non-conductive.
That’s, that’s my first worry. He’s like, man, I don’t know the early wind turbines. Uh, we’re, if you think of the Nestles, the little covers that go over the generators, those are just made, those are were made out of just fiberglass is so electrically and they were transparent. So any sort of electrical noise from the outside world just passes right through.
That gets into our, our electronics and our wiring of systems and test. And we used to do years ago on wind turbines found that like those fiberglass shells. Or just really bad at at protecting electronics, right? There’s no, there’s not providing a shielding. So we see measure these huge voltages and currents on, on wiring and Southern the cell during simulator.
Lightning strikes to the point where equipment was dying all the time because of it. And to take shielding away just adds additional works. You’ve got to put this, you got to put shielding back in, and the tower was like an easy. Shield. Uh, so what are we shielding from? So you mentioned noise. Um, what backup, explain this to me as if I’m 12.
What, what are we shielding from? What does this mean? What is the noise? Like how is that going to affect the systems? All right, let’s just, let’s take a simplistic lightning case. Uh, lightning strikes a blade and that current is going to run down the blade. It’s going to run through the. Then the cell, and then it’s got to go run down through the tower to get to earth.
Well, if the tower itself is made out of someplace non-conductive, then you have to create a wire pass. So somewhere they’ve got a wire connecting down conductor, right? There’s a down conductor in the tower, so that down conductors carrying a lot of energy. All this lightening energy is going down. This one wire will all your power wire, all your phase wires that are, that are from the generator spinning and pushing power out to the outside world.
Those wires or cup or getting the energy coupled from that grounding wire. So the down conductors coupling energy on those other wires sitting right next to it, upsetting the generator system. So you’ve got this, uh, bad coupling going on that at the levels can get really, really high really quick. Yeah.
Gotcha. Interesting. Yeah, I didn’t think about that. So the other thing that is tossed around a little bit, but it doesn’t seem like in any serious like commercial way is a wood wind turbine blades. And what do you feel like the. Engineering, I mean, does engineering of this work? Well, blaze, even modern blades today have a lot of balsa wood inside of them.
Instead of on an aircraft part, we would use honeycomb core, uh, which is a paper product that, uh, provides stiffness to a composite piece of composite structure on winter and blazer use balsa as that core. So there is wood inside of those, most of the blades today, uh. That’s normal. And on smaller wind turbines, the, like the home brew wind turbines they have, they’d be made out of wood for a long time.
It wasn’t until recently he started making out of fiberglass and carbon fiber. So there were a lot of wind turbine blades and around homes, particularly in the Midwest that were made out of wood. Obviously they have not much or zero lightening protection on them. So when they did get hit, they just exploded.
Uh, yeah. So what, what, what does not a great conductor? It’s like lightning hitting a tree. Yeah. It’s pretty much a bomb and got shrapnel all over the place. So does that seem like it’s easier to repair or more difficult to repair if it takes a lightning strike and has some damage compared to fiberglass blade?
Uh, well, uh, what blade is going to have a lot more collateral damage? Uh, if it depends on where the lightning goes, if it goes inside, wood is just going to explode like a tree. Uh, fiberglass. Yeah. It has some design strength to it. It tends to crack. Both are bad. Both are bad. Yeah. No, nothing here is easy.
Right. Welcome. Welcome to engineering. Nothing is easy. Yeah, fair enough. Um, well, you know, and to, to put the wood thing to bed, it says the main, like you said, recyclability. I think you’re spot on with recyclability. Like steel is always like, okay, this thing’s done. Alright, let’s melt that tower down and make it into something else.
I guess steel’s always, it’s never really going away, which is kind of my, I remember as a kid, my mom was like, Hey, turn that off. You’re wasting water. I’m like. This water’s not going anywhere. It’s not going down the drain and then like leaving the planet like this water’s going to like, it’s going to roll.
Idea of waste. Yeah. This whole idea of wasting water, like water never leaves. Well, it’s funny that it’s wasting money. It’s wasting money, but yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s wasting money. In Maryland though. In Maryland, you’re right next to the ocean and it’s always raining there, and there’s always a plethora of lakes, of fresh bodies of water there.
But in Arizona. In California, kind of bad or dry cause it doesn’t rain as much. Yeah. So I got the same thing in Nebraska, but it’s always, it’s, they have underground aquifers in Nebraska that are sizes of States. Uh, so they’re not gonna run out of water anytime soon there, but I get the same lecture. Sure.
Yeah. Of course. But anyway, so I digress. But, but yeah, so it seems like it’s not the recyclability thing that they’re pushing. It’s really the, uh, it says that it. A single full-size wooden turbine would avoid the 2000 tons of carbon emissions produced by making a steel analog. So that seems to be the appeal, I guess, as Siemens give me, he says, pledged to be a zero net emissions in the coming years.
So they just don’t want the, the processing damage, the environment, just putting out all that carbon, that CO2. So, yeah. Interesting. I don’t, I don’t know that much about that, that side of things. I hear all this like carbon neutral stuff and, um. I don’t, I haven’t delved into the research about it, so I’m not really sure where I fall on that.
Well, I think you said, yeah, and Dan, you got to get away both sides of the equation. It isn’t like the Woodside has zero net effect. There’s a net effect on their site too, and don’t let the, the marketing people sway over just because it’s made out of trees that affords better. There’s still a lot of energy being trucked it over here too.
Yeah. They’re going to cut it down. Yeah. I’d use chainsaws with gas in them. It was the same thing about the ethanol, like the . Yeah. They talked about that for so long, like, Oh, this is our solution to gas, but it’s like, well, you have to process all this corn. Like these combines are like, there’s so much processing where, and again, I don’t know the numbers here either, but people were like, eh, after subsidies and all this other stuff, like is not really that great, or ethanol is not really that great.
Compared to gas cause still to be trucked around and all this other stuff. Yeah. It’s interesting debate. Hearing both sides of it. Yeah. Well, Hey, I’ll, I will tell you, there’s, in my mind that there are two competing technologies that are the realistic way forward. One is maybe we get to some sort of battery power thing that makes sense.
And we can actually store some energy in it and okay. And we get to some sort of nuclear thing. The other part is hydrogen. I, for the life of me cannot figure out why we don’t have hydrogen powered cars, because those cars were developed. Probably no, it was 2001 2000 and twoish Honda had a hydrogen powered car.
I think you can actually still get hydrogen powered cars, some Honda and maybe even general motors. It just burns and banks. It makes water, that water and that water. Right, and it uses it roughly the same infrastructure we have today. That you go to a refueling station, you’d plug your nozzle into the car and it would take two minutes, five minutes to to fill your tank up.
And in a way, you go for another 300 400 miles on a tank of hydrogen. Why haven’t, why haven’t we done that? I do not know because it isn’t like battery powered cars are the safest thing in the world either. Think about it. One of the first things they had to do when the battery powered cars started coming around again.
Uh, and this is probably the third or fourth time in my lifetime that I’ve had battery powered cars, is you’ve got to train all the fire stations and all the S the EMS people how to deal with a battery powered car, because it’s. It’s, it’s full of energy right in. The first thing that you know, you worry about is that that thing is going to have some sort of electrical short and catch on fire, which they do.
Right? So there’s a lot of infrastructure things that battery cars that you have to straighten out just with any sort of change in technology. Why didn’t we do hydrogen? I do not know. I don’t know. Yeah, that’s a good question. And it’s also. Like I was big into the, uh, the aftermarket Jeep world when I was in high school and early into college and I worked on old callers, old cars, my brother.
And there’s this one thing that a lot of ’em for some reason it’s big. And like the off-roading world where, you know, you have like a rock crawler or something like that, you’re going to be off the grid for awhile. People will convert them into propane. I know they have propane, they have propane, um, running, uh.
Buses in a lot of cities. It’s true. And, and it’s, it’s interesting because it’s usually cheaper, at least it was, but I’m not sure if it’s still cheaper for the equivalent amount of propane, but your oil just like stays golden apparently forever because of how clean the propane burns. Just really fascinating.
Um, but, but yeah, just to, and that’s not really a very difficult switch over. And I think it was more efficient, but I really, I can’t remember. That was probably 10 years ago when I was thinking about all that. It’s like, I’ll put a propane tank in my Jeep. It’s like. Yeah. But still it’s still out there.
Yeah. It’s probably not a reasonable solution cause it’s still a fossil fuel. Uh, right. Maybe not. But again, you were talking about transitions, right? You need to get from a two cycle engine to a four cycle engine from a four cycle engine to some sort of battery power thing or something has less emissions and you’re going to transition to where you want to get to.
It just doesn’t happen immediately. And so going back to battery. In this article here, it says, Tesla’s preparing this media day to kind of announce that it sounds like the battery is going to lower the expected cost per kilowatt hour to under a hundred dollars, which they say is like a big milestone where that’s going to make electric cars a lot more affordable.
So that was supposed to happen in, or I guess it’s coming up soon, but no firm date set. So pretty interesting. I was listening to his podcast and he mentioned just some other speed advancements, like their car. We talked about this one. Zero to 60 in 1.9 and, and, and then this new battery technology. So it does sound like they’re doing a lot of interesting things.
So they’re trying to eliminate cobalt from these, uh, these batteries. Cause that’s like kind of like a, like a blood diamond kind of situation over there and just brutal conditions for workers and conflict. Men are, um, yeah, that’s a conflict mineral. Yeah. Yeah. So the last thing on the, the, the, the docket today, I want to talk a little bit about leading edge erosion.
We’ll talk more about this in coming episodes, but. Um, that’s one of the main issues with, with maintenance for these wind turbine blades. Um, tell me a little bit about leading edge erosion and protection for these leading edges. Cause obviously there, these bleeds are moving so fast and especially in rain, snow, sleet, um, especially.
Well, we’ll, we’ll leave it there. What do you got on the, on leading edge erosion fitting as erosion as the effect where water power calls or ice particles are actually hitting the plastic edges of winter and blades and creating this pitting damage. You see the same thing on aircraft. Helicopter blades, same thing, but in the wind turbine case it tends to be mostly rain, sometimes snow, sometimes ice, and as those little tiny particles.
Uh, hit the, hit the blade surface. There’s like a shockwave. Uh, if you think about, it’s hard to conceive a little droplet of water doing any real damage, but you hit it hard enough and if enough speed, it creates a shockwave in the blade itself, especially on the surfaces where these coatings are and it wants to try to rip the coating off or to shear the coating off and one water droplet won’t do it.
It’s going to take millions and millions of water droplets. Well, if you’re out in the ocean, you’re in someplace. It rains a lot. It doesn’t take long for that blade to impact millions of water droplets. And so the accumulation over time starts to happen. You get this very odd shape pitting happening onto the blade.
Now. It’s just like, uh, having a wound on your skin. You know, once you get past the outer skin layer, you’re down into things that matter. You’re getting into the structure of a wind turbine blade and you’re shoving water inside of it, and that does even more damage once the water gets inside in the freeze and thaw, that can occur on a lot of places on the planet where it’s cold.
And in the winter time you get water inside of a structure and you let it freeze and it expands. It tends to rip apart everything it gets into. So. Leading edge erosion. Rain erosion one obviously impacts the aerodynamics. It makes it less efficient for that blade to spin, but the subsequent is it starts to affect the structure and if you get water.
Into the structure and the free of that. Now you can really be destroying a wind turbine blade and it’s almost invisible in a sense, because from the outside on the blade, it doesn’t look like that much has happened on the outside. But on the inside, if it’s full of water, now you have a really big problem.
You got to go South. So what’s the typical time where you started to see problems? Obviously it varies a lot depending on the climate and all that. So climate. Yeah, it’s, it’s related to climate, uh, related to the speed of the turbine blade. It’s related to the coatings that they put on the turbine blade where they’ve actually done any testing or not like ELAM, glass fiber.
And now GE, uh, built a rain erosion test facility over in Denmark to, to check that out. And so they’re, they’re looking at it closely. There are a number of, of rain erosion test facilities in the world. Uh, Dayton, Ohio, there’s one, uh, over in Ireland in Limerick, Ireland, there’s a smaller set up, so there’s a couple of setups around the world that people go to, but if they haven’t done any testing, then it’s just.
Really you’re guessing at it and it’s like the worst possible way to do anything engineering wise, particularly for some that’s going to be out in the atmosphere for 20 plus years. And what are these tests facilities look like? I assume they’re not just creating rain and swinging things through it. I’m sure they’re just blasting water, like using a high pressure.
Nope nozzle and just blasting stuff or how does it work? No, it was your first guests actually. Really, that seems like, that seems like a huge pain. I mean, that seems like it was accurate, but that seems like a huge pain. Yeah. They think of it like a grain silo, if you’re, sorry, from the Midwest. But if you ever see a gray style, it’s this round round cylindrical building, right?
What you do is you, uh, uh, take, you make a round cylindrical billing and then you make these rings of syringes. And you hook those up to water. So you got these a couple of hundred syringes hanging from the ceiling essentially, and then you can sound like a horror movie, but it’s a little scary walking into, quite honestly, I don’t like be around needles.
And that’s a place, there’s a lot of needles. So, and then they take an electric motor on the floor with the, with a, uh, it looks like a helicopter blade on it. Something similar to that, and it’s a whirling, we call a whirling arm, and then you put your samples on the, on this whirling arm, and you spin it so it’s spinning horizontally, and then you turn the water and the water droplets fall, and the water droplets have to be a certain size and it’s all at a certain rate.
Usually it’s an inch per hour or two inches per hour or something like that. And they just impact it like it would be, uh, supposedly, like it’s supposed to be in the natural environment. The, the kicker to that system is when you start spinning something in a cylindrical tower, it creates its own aerodynamics.
And so the water droplets always don’t fall as perfectly as maybe they should and it does. And so every setup of I’ve been to or seen has its own particular characteristics. No two facilities are the same and no two facilities that give you the same result. It’s really an apples to, you have to run one sample and run it against another sample and see what the differences are.
There is no absolute and there is no knowns. The engineering world will tell you there’s a known standard for that. I say that is not true. Based on everything I’ve seen. There is no known standard for rain erosion. Every part of the world has their own unique characteristic. You’re just going to have to go test it.
Uh, yeah. The only ones that I’ve, I think I’ve done a a very interesting. Your unique setup or over in Limerick? Um, Ireland, university of Limerick where they, they have a smaller cylinder. It has a rotating arm on it and it’s, it’s, it’s needles, but there’s a circle of needles, not a, not a plethora needles.
This is like a circle of needles. And they timed the water. They have each of those needles on a little, uh, uh, water valve. Tom that’s timed so that the water drop, while that comes out, the needle impacts the sample every time. So they time it so the water droplet hits the sample. It’s not random. So they actually spin this thing and they time these water droplets that that.
I think that provides a lot more consistency to the result that hasn’t been implemented everywhere. I’ve only seen that setup over and over in Ireland, but I like that one because it’s compacted, didn’t have to build a whole building, and two, it’s, it’s going to give you a very consistent results. So it’s spinning, like you said, like a helicopter blades.
So horizontally, I mean, isn’t that going to like sort of push air up towards the falling rain and like give a buffer, like kind of like soften us, blow to it? I feel like, and of course with a wind turbine that’s the, it’s perpendicular to the axis. It’d be spinning in real life. Right. Is that problematic?
No, that’s a great question. I don’t know if there’s any good answer to that. They are dynamics. I’ve never seen anybody do modeling of the aerodynamics of a rain erosion facility. To see what actually is going on there. You look at other stuff to do, they’re busy. They’re out riding their horse, riding their horses and their electric lawn mowers.
Yeah. Yeah. They may, they may be doing that, but, uh, the way it’s, uh, let’s just, let’s just talk is basic engineering right now. If you can’t, if you don’t know what’s going on in the real world, you try to simulate the best you can. And how do you do that? Well, you’ve got to limit a pot of money and that pot of money, what can you do with that pot of money?
That’s what happened. And, and Dayton, Ohio is where the air force research lab always was. Uh, I think they, they transferred ownership of that rain erosion facility to the university of Dayton, I think. I think BF Goodrich also has one out there similarly, but, uh, it’s sort of brute force, whatever, whatever we can mock up in the lab.
We can then build a structure and just test it, and then w w there’s no absolutes here. It’s definitely a to B to C testing and that’s what you go with. Gotcha. That’s interesting. Yeah, that makes sense. Because like you said, Hey, we need facilities, and B, they’re never going to be exactly the same. They’re going to be like snowflake and see, it’s not going to perfectly replicate the environment.
That is a really interesting thing because we think of all these, you know, you see like these tests of consumer products where they have like this mechanical system. It’s like punching the car seat, you know, 50,000 times to like see how well the car seat wears. And you’re like, okay, that’s really interesting.
But none of these are ever going to completely replicate the actual environment of a human putting their fat butt down the car seat. Nope. 30,000 times between, yeah. In 10 years. So, Nope. That’s interesting that, you know, you couldn’t just necessarily compare it from one facility to the next. And expect.
You just have to go, all right, let’s get all samples to this one facility on all, you know, some other facilities and they’ve, they’ve done some, what they call round Robin testing. So you, you, you take the same samples, you run into different facilities. They do the same thing in the lightning world too.
Same, same thing. And I will tell you, having to been to a lot of lightening facilities, you’re not getting the same result. If you’re not getting the same result, even though you think you have locked this thing in and you will have specifications special on the aerospace side, you’ve got specifications that say, well, this should get similar results.
Nope. Nope. You’re going to get, they’re not going to be identical. I mean, they’re going to be an engender, generally the same. Yeah. But that’s the most you can hope for. All American lightning doesn’t exercise as much. They need a lot more fatty foods, so there’s lightning bolts are way, way different. He had a Japanese lightening bolt.
They want more greens in their diet. A lot healthier way out there. Yeah. Yeah. Mediterranean light bolts, I mean, great. Great. A life expectancy. Yeah, so it’s important stuff. I think that I, you know, obviously. Having grown up in the United States, particularly the era that we grew up in, a lot of things are sort of Americanized standard because you don’t have to go outside of America to get pretty much anything you want.
Right. Um, yeah. And so you sort of, things kind of get homegrown or you assume everything in the world is just like that. That is the furthest thing from the case. America is the environment in America is way different than environment in Europe and a lot of cases it’s totally different than the environment and South America, you can’t, you just can’t assume one size fits all.
That’s a classic engineering mistake. It’s just like if you bought a car, he made, would you buy, would you buy a Japanese car like that? In a sense, like the Japanese cars can be different than American cars. It’s going to have different performance because, and I’ll give you a good example. When I used to buy a Honda’s early on, I didn’t think they performed very well in really cold weather.
Now that’s changed. That’s changed a lot. Uh, that. And I’ll give you even a better example. So kart, Honda cars and Canada came with extra features because it’s so dang cold up there that I couldn’t, I couldn’t buy, I wear probably maybe two and a half hours from the border of Canada, so it’s cold here. We couldn’t buy those same things.
Right. So every, every, every different part of the world is a different environment. Yeah, no, that makes sense. I mean, just like the. Formulation of Coca Cola is different all over it. Yeah, it is. It is like people’s tastes change, but it’s your point. It’s more like the testing, like maybe a car company was born in South America where they just don’t have cold weather days to really test like what it’s like driving a car and Winnipeg.
Yeah, and maybe it’s just just fundamentally different. Like they’re not as good at making a cold weather car there. Right. It seems to reason it seems reasonable. Right, right. So we were doing the same thing at wind turbines, right? We’re, we’re figuring out those different climates and there’s different light in particular, the lightning side, there’s different levels of lightening blatant, even where it responds differently in different parts of the world.
Should, we shouldn’t be surprised by that. We are all the time surprised by it, but we shouldn’t be surprised about it because we should have known that from other things we’ve already done. Yeah. Gotcha. Gotcha. All right, well that’s going to do it for today’s episode of uptime. Alan, thanks again for another great show and for all of you out there, thank you for listening.
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