Nicholas Gaudern, CTO of Power Curve, joined the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast to discuss his company’s performance upgrades for wind turbines. After analyzing a blade using a laser scan, Power Curve recommends an ideal placement of either vortex generators, gurney flaps, trailing edge serrations (or a combination of all three). Mr. Gaudern shares his view of the performance upgrade market and where he sees the industry going as wind farm operators fight to increase Annual Energy Production (AEP) and prevent performance degradation over time from leading edge erosion, dirt, blade misalignment and more. Check out their YouTube channel for more.
Learn more about Weather Guard Lightning Tech’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
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EP44 – Nicholas Gaudern, CTO of Power Curve, Explains Blade Aerodynamics & Power Curve Upgrades
Welcome back to the uptime podcast. I’m your co-host Dan Blewett on today’s episode. We have a great guest. NicholasGaudern, CTO of Power Curve is here. And we had a really fantastic conversation, all about a wind turbine, power curve, upgrades, blade, aerodynamics, all that good stuff. So, Allen, I’ll kick this off to you.
What were some of your takeaways from our conversation with Nick? Well, I was shocked.
Allen Hall: [00:01:08] And how much performance improvement that a power curve can offer to existing blaze that that even have damage to them. So leading edge erosion damage, uh, hail, whatever, they can basically eliminate the, the additional dragon power curve loss by the addition.
Of, uh, vortex generators, gurney flaps, um, and bring back that power and make the blade somewhat insensitive to a lot of the dirt and contamination and issues that happen typically on winter.
Dan: [00:01:41] Yeah, it was a really interesting conversation. I think it, uh, I think it really demystified. A lot of the air dynamics stuff, especially which can get pretty complex, uh, regarding, you know, air flow over wind turbine blades.
And it’s not a
Allen Hall: [00:01:52] one stop fix. They are tailoring the aerodynamic improvements and modifications to the sites particular. A wind turbine manufacturer and blade style, and what would be happening on those blades at this particular moment? So it’s, it’s not, VGs everywhere. It is selective use of the proper solution to improve those particular turbines.
And they go through this comparative phase where they upgrade. One turbine next to another turbine and show that the power curve increase, the AEP has gone up and they can actually monitor that. So they’re there, they’re proven their technology onsite before they implement it on a, on a larger scale, on a particular site, which is the right way to do it.
Show that it works, demonstrate its durability. And then when we. Cross that threshold. Now we can do the rest of the Germans and bringing our whole site up in terms of AEP. It’s still it’s the right way to go.
Dan: [00:02:48] So without further ado, let’s kick it off to our conversation with Nicholas Gaudern, CTO from Power Curve.
All right, Nick. Uh, thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate you coming. Yeah, you’re very welcome. Nice to speak to you guys. So obviously today we’re gonna talk a ton about power curve and blade aerodynamics and all that stuff. Um, but first I want to talk about, you know, when blades roll off the factory floor.
Um, you know, obviously the air dynamics are as good as they’re ever going to be. And then after that, you know, with wear and tear and the accumulation of dust and dirt, and just all those things that, you know, happen over time, you know, the performance will begin to degrade. Um, so one of the lesser known things that we’ve chatted a little bit about with other guests on the show, um, is dirt buildup.
So. Uh, that’s one of those lesser known performance killers. Can, can you shine some light on how big of a problem that is? And then also what are some other lesser known performance?
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:03:55] Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, this, this notion of. Uh, the factory team blade as new blade is really important because when a blade is being designed, um, the aerodynamic data that’s used in the process is typically more, but when time, and that’s often from a one-time when you’re using a really team model, you know, you can only see your face in these things.
So as soon as you even paint the surface, uh, it’s very likely that the air force is going to perform the like. You might expect from a winter. So it’s, it’s firstly important just to sort of think about that, but then obviously as soon as the blade gets out in the real world, it’s experienced to these, you know, avid changing environmental conditions, uh, ice erosion, they’re all going to play a role in performance.
So. When we talk about, uh, I think it’s, it’s good to sort of take this broader picture or most so, you know, not, not just the erosion high school, these are the things we just mentioned and what what’s actually happening, um, are dynamically is when you get a contamination on the surface on erosion acting quite similar ways, it’s adding roughness to the surface, of course.
Uh, but what does that roughness do? Well, When we have an athlete over a surface, um, the bit that’s very close to the surface, close to the wall is called the boundary layer. And that’s the area of flow where the Fox is zero right at the surface. And it increases up to the free stream. Now what happens to that boundary layer is critical to determining what the Aeroform performance like.
So as soon as you put any obstacles in the flow, that’s going to affect how that boundary layer behaves, how it grows, how it evolves. Right. So when we put that dirt in, um, we’re impacting the boundary layer, you know, the health of the boundary layer and therefore the, the level of performance we’re going to get.
So what we typically see in, in simple terms is we see a loss of lift. Which is bad because Lyft is also creating our talk force. That’s giving us the power books, our increase in drag. So we’re pulling on the rotor. Basically we’re reducing power. It can produce so lots of left, increased drive that both occurring due to dirt.
And depending on where they occur on the blade, they’ll affects the performance in different ways. But typically erosion and contamination tends to be worse. The tip cause that’s why our local flow speeds are highest. So bugs stick more erosion happens
Dan: [00:06:30] more quickly. So it’s a big ripple effect is what it sounds like.
Just like a little bit of contamination. The surface is going to affect the boundary layer and then everything beyond it. Yeah.
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:06:37] Basically it, it affects all of the float downstream of where that contamination’s occurring. And what we can do is we can actually model that. So we can say, well, if my RFR will have performance next, and it’s now got performance, Y what is the ADP?
And typically what we see in the field is even on a pretty clean blade, you might lose a few tenths of a percent ADP just from like a surface roughness, things like that. But you might lose up to say three or 4% AP. Due to due to contamination. But I would say that the upper end for a modern turbine on sale is quite rare.
Typically going to be in the. You know, up to 2% range I would say is, is, is pretty common just for what you might need to lose.
Dan: [00:07:21] Could you, while we, while we have you on this aerodynamic path, could you dive a little deeper into air flow separation, and maybe just give a for people, including myself who don’t have a background in heritage dynamics, you know, knows what the basics are as far as air flow and what they might need to
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:07:36] know.
The concept of stall is really critical to, uh, to ablate design because. Store, uh, in again, in sort of basic terms, it’s, it’s bad because you lose left, you increase drag, you increase noise. It’s basically this dangerous for air and performance. So, you know, really you want the, the boundary there to be nicely attached to the surface as it does it traverses over the cord.
One definition of store is when that boundaries are starting to separate. From the trailing edge. And that’s typically where we see this separation style, the wind turbine and trailing edge. So that, that I would start basically peeling away from the surface, from the trailing edges. We come towards the leading edge and the more it separates, the more it’s peeling off the surface, the more left you’ll lose.
The more drag you’ll increase on the more noise will go. So if you think of a curve. Lift versus the flow angle over an hour for them as we increase the flow angle, the less it’s going to go up pretty early and then we’ll reach a pink drop off the peak and that peak dropping over the other side. That’s what we call store.
Dan: [00:08:48] Okay. So do you want to get as close as possible to that then? Or is there, you
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:08:53] know, you want it to be, you want to be like a safe distance away, um, on people’s definition of safe. Can be quite different, but I would say a good rule of thumb is like two or three degrees angle of attack of that, that inflow angle coming into the blade.
So that means that when you get a gust, you get a sudden change in flow direction due to this is terminal when your field that we’re experiencing out in the real world, that means you’re unlikely to go over that stall point too much is rule of thumb. You want to stay away from stone.
Dan: [00:09:25] So there’s like that little margin for error,
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:09:27] essentially.
Yeah. Yeah. Basically it’s just, it’s narrow dharmic safety margin. You can think about it like that. So the designer has two goals in mind when they’re configuring that blade shape, it’s getting peak efficiency of our form. So people have to drag ratio and having a sensible store margin. The problem is that some error forms might have that peak efficiency really close to the store.
And then you said, well, what do I do? Do I risk it? Or do I drop back and actually stay safe, but accepts that I’m not going to get the peak efficiency that they, we could deliver.
Dan: [00:10:03] It sounds then like the, the big battle in, you know, the wind power industry is that a, they want to figure out where the. The the best, uh, you know, how close they can get to the stall margin without being too risky.
And, uh, obviously then they’re going to have to fight all the contaminants that will maybe build up on the blade over time and erosion. And I mean, is that a pretty decent summary of the, kind of the battle, this Wade’s for keeping your power?
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:10:29] It is. Yeah. And it does link really nicely back to the, this sort of clean our food discussion.
Um, I think it’s really important to say that. An Aerofoil performance curve. Let’s say this lift versus angle of attack. It’s a living, breathing thing. You know, it’s never the same from almost one day to the next, because it depends so heavily on the surface condition. So our stall point that sets at 10 degrees angle when the blade is new, when that blade is dirty, the air may stall up seven degrees.
So that stall point has moved in words because the boundary layer health has suffered so much due to this, this contaminant, this erosion. So, yeah, it’s this battle of understanding where stall is trying to keep away from it. Financing Dubai to mitigate against that
Allen Hall: [00:11:20] problem. Nick, what are the other effects happen with blade tip stall?
Because the blade has a slight twist to it, correct? So that the whole blade is not at the same angle of attack and the more aggressive angle of attack. So to speak would be out of the tip. We were trying to generate most of your power. So if the blade goes into stall out at the tip, what other, what happens to the blade as a twist, as it start to flutter?
What, what effects does it have
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:11:46] typically, you know, unless there’s something really catastrophic going on out fanatically, you will just see a loss of power that would get it. That would be the first thing you see. And it’ll typically be sort of a, what we call it a knee of the power curve know just before you get up to rate it, because that’s where the angle of attacks are highest, typically just before rated.
So that’s where you start to see the power loss. If the aerofoils are. Of a certain design, is that quite an aggressive stool to lift difference as they pass over the peak is quite steep. You might start to get like increased fatigue, loading one blade as you travel back and forth. So
Allen Hall: [00:12:26] your install out of stall, is that what the condition
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:12:29] is?
Yeah, exactly. So we’re in this turbulent, Winfield, which, uh, is really horrible, you know, analytically, because trials trying to understand this way field is, is. Not impossible. So you can never think of, yeah, you’ve caught the static. Target’s always amazing time, you know, you’re working with on the inflow angle, the flow speed, all this kind of thing.
So yeah. Power loss for install, noise increase, possibly some fatigue load increase. And typically it will progress from, from the tip in broad, you know, as, as a
Allen Hall: [00:13:03] rule. So as an operator, Can I tell just by walking around where I have issues with angle of attack and, and maybe my Blake tips install. Could I hear that on the ground?
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:13:13] Maybe? I think, you know, that there are people who are very familiar with the way turbines sound, you know, some of the technicians are out there with them every day and they, they may well be able to pick up, uh, some stolen noise if it’s, if it’s, you know, quite severe. Sure. But to the uncalibrated air, you know, it may be a little bit difficult.
So probably the first thing you would look at is your, is your SCADA data and trying to, to hunt down. Can I see that certain time of year, maybe when there’s a lot of dirt, can I see like a degradation in the power curve, particularly around the knee area? So, but it’s hard, you know, it’s really hard because we’re looking at small.
Well, small losses. Let’s say it’s a 1% AP loss. Well, unless you’ve got a really solid baseline data set, trying to track that could be quite, do
Allen Hall: [00:14:06] operators have that baseline data set when the blades are new, do they track that over time?
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:14:10] I would say it’s not very common. It’s not very common though. Some operators are really on it when it comes to SCADA, you know, they’ve got great machine learning, AI techniques, all this kind of stuff.
They’re employing. But I would say that’s not the majority at all. So unless you’re tracking all these metrics really carefully from day one. Yeah. It might be quite difficult to find a loss of, of that magnitude. The
Allen Hall: [00:14:35] operators may have, you know, they’re losing that a percentage point. Yeah.
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:14:38] I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s the issue.
Yeah. You may have these turbines running and you know, they look all right to the naked eye. You can’t really see anything obvious in the power curve that you’re comfortable putting a bet on. So almost it’s a bit invisible. So, so what we try to do a power curve is we talk about like an inverse proof.
Well, let’s say you’ve got a blade out there. You don’t believe anything’s wrong with it. Okay, fine. Well, let’s test the opposite hypothesis. Let’s assume there is something wrong with it. Based on our economic understanding, let’s apply a effects. So to say something like a vortex generator, and now let’s use a really precise method of scarf analysis.
To determine whether performance improves, you know, back in the months after we installed the upgrade. And if we see an upgrade of AP and increase, well, then we proved that was a problem to begin with. So maybe very hard to determine when you had a problem to start with. But yeah, take this in spruce methods, apply effects.
Do I get performance gain? Well, then you’ve sort of answered your
Allen Hall: [00:15:45] question, right? Yeah. That’s a really good way to go about it. What, what Scott, uh, improvements do you make to
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:15:50] track that? So we typically use a medical decide by sight method. Um, it’s pretty common in the industry. A lot of theory, M’s users and some of the independent, um, validation houses like torture Winguard for example.
So what you do is you take two turbines, um, the next to each other, and very close to each other, and you make sure that you’ve got like six to 12 months of. Data where those turbines haven’t been touched now to control change or maintenance operation. So you work out how this pool perform relative to each other.
So you got to tell some performance based the team you’ve done upgrade one of the turbines, whether you or we are out in our kits. And then you’ll just continue measuring, as you always would discard it. Um, you know, six to 12 months after that, you then say, well, what’s my new Delta performance between these turbines.
So I’ve called Delta after the installation. I subtract Delta before the installation and I’m left with what’s the change. And if there’s a positive change that will, you know, great we’ve found some performance. And the nice thing about the side-by-side method is that it basically eliminates. The uncertainty of your wind measurement, right?
Because you don’t use it, you’re just using the power signal and it’s the wind speed measurement. That’s the thing that has huge uncertainty associated with it with, with other techniques, even when I’m at masters, it’s not great.
Allen Hall: [00:17:16] So you can do, you can do this experiment then without any modifications to the control system or anything about the triathlon.
You just let them run for a
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:17:25] couple of months. Yeah. Yeah. You know, just keep measuring the SCADA data as, as you normally would. And. Yeah time just to do your analysis, it’s all just about the mathematical process you use to, to analyze that data set. And yeah, we have really nice method, a power curve we’ve worked with, um, the Dodger Winguard on that tree, or really experienced in that field.
Um, We get really good customer acceptance of that method. That fact that happy with that, that kind of comparison, because it’s something they’re familiar doing themselves,
Allen Hall: [00:17:57] right. That they can monitor themselves. They don’t need a third party to be involved in
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:18:00] that. So, yeah, no, exactly. I mean, sometimes they do just because it’s always nice to have a, you know, another pair of eyes on the problem, but sure.
Matched operators could do the analysis themselves. Wow.
Allen Hall: [00:18:11] Okay. So the, the upgrades that would happen to the blade, if, if you come onto a site and it’s say it’s been out there four or five, six years, and you know, it’s in, uh, in the blade SAR in rough condition, some of them you can just see from the ground, what are the, what are the things in your toolbox to get the AEP back up to where it should be?
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:18:31] Yeah, it’s a great question. And, um, I would say that the primary tool we have is, uh, is more text generators. So if we sort of think back to this discussion map, the boundary layer, and the fact that erosion contamination is, is damaging the health of the boundary layer and therefore we’re losing performance.
Well, what a vortex generator does close a magnet, generates a vortex, but why is that important? So. When you put a VG on the surface, what it’s doing, if you put it in the right place is it’s generating this, uh, vortex pair. What that does is that draws down or, and trains this higher energy flow from outside the boundary layer basically sort of sucks it down to the surface.
So what we’re doing is where we’re reenergizing the boundary layer. We’re going to increase its health. And what that means is instead of getting this training and separation, that might’ve been creeped again, because the bandwidth is getting a bit old and tired by the time has reached the trailing edge.
The VG has re-energized it. And it means it can stay fully attached all the way to the trailing edge. So if we restore this, this flow attachment, we get our lift back that we lost. Now we might recover a little bit of drug depending on how severe the store was, but it’s the lift recovery. That’s the really key thing, um, that the VTG can enable.
So what we do at power curve is. Well, when we go to a site we’ve been invited to assess where we look at the Blake condition, particularly on the leading edge. And if, if there are drone inspection photographs available, that’s perfect because they’re really high resolution close to the leading edge. We can actually make an assessment of how that erosion is affecting performance.
So we can run an aerodynamic simulation, like a competition for the dynamic simulation. So once we know how bad the problem is, we can then basically prescribe the cure. So that will typically be a vortex generator array, but it will be in a particular location called horizon spam wise, to address the specific level of contamination, uh, severity that the turbine house, most of the time, they’re all pretty much in the same place.
However, a nice case study we had recently was a wind turbine that was. So severely contaminated, uh, to, to nickel turbine it wouldn’t team where each 1.5 megawatts. So, you know, catastrophic ergonomic issue and that. You know, we had to be a bit more aggressive in how we fix the problem, but yeah, I mean,
Dan: [00:21:03] that’s going to affect the whole output of the wind farm.
I mean, if they’re 1.5, when they’re expecting 2.5, I mean, that’s a, is that a 40 to 40% drop? I mean, that’s huge.
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:21:13] It’s, it’s a huge issue. And this is why, you know, I mean, that’s, that’s like the most extreme case I’ve ever seen by some margin men. It just goes to show that it can happen. And you know, when you go and do your blade inspection for structural damage, It’s super important to start thinking about their dynamics as well, because,
Dan: [00:21:32] you know, when you, you guys install these, these kits, do you, is there a really thorough cleaning process that goes along with it?
I mean, how do you prep? Uh, cause I do want to get into the, the three main ones, obviously vortex generators, and you guys also use gurney flaps and trailing agents serrations of bunch. So can you tell us about the process of getting their kit sort of installed on the, on the plays?
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:21:54] So, um, I mean, it’s a fairly straightforward process compared to a lot of work that might go on on the turbine.
So what we do is, um, it’s typically installed by a rope access crew. Um, but you know, could use a man basketball chair, but typically a road crew. So the first step would be to go and Mark up the blade. Um, certain Mark the, the installation line of where you’re going to put your kits. And that will come from that from a manual that we provide.
So typically it’s pretty, low-tech, you know, she’s like a chore client just sort of snap it on the blade and get some kind of marketing. Then what you’ll do is you’ll, you’ll clean the surface, um, with just some light sandpaper grit paper, just to upgrade away any, any serious dirt and just, just roughing the surface a bit.
So it’s more suitable for bonding. Wipe it down with some, some nice protein I’ll call or we’ll send a lot cleaner and then basically you’re good to go. So, um, power curve only uses a wet structural adhesive to apply VGs because in our experience, the alternative, which might just be a self, a decent tape is simply not a robust enough solution.
We are a lot of complaints about out arms that have been put on the tape only. Fallen or not. And the fact we use this word, a decent means that, you know, you can be fairly, uh, flexible. Let’s say, you know, in, in the surface quality of bonding too, because it’s. It’s just basically a destructive, but once that glue is there, it’s, it’s not going anywhere.
Dan: [00:23:31] And so how do you get your models of, cause you obviously do a lot of modeling and to determine where, you know, they’re losing power. What does that modeling process look like?
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:23:40] I mean, that’s what we spend a lot of our time on. Um, um, there’s a lot of complex dynamics going on this year, as you can imagine.
So. The first step is to actually obtain the blade geometry, to make sure that we can analyze, uh, the specific module of turbine blade that we’re looking at. So we do that with a laser scanning process. Um, Typically we do that with a blade on the ground because it’s a bit easier, but we can do it when the blades on the tower just means you have to have a very still face of the blade.
It’s not moving around all over the place. Really. We then get a really fast laser scanner scan. The entire blade surface got a point cloud. And then we reverse engineer out a solid cut surface from that point that makes me forms the basis of all the
Dan: [00:24:29] subsequent steps. That’d be really precise. Right. I mean, if it’s going to capture that, that fine build up, cause we’re not talking about like six inches of Kate, you know, dirt almost,
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:24:40] maybe just to clarify, we’re just after the blade shape.
Okay. Uh, at vistas. Yeah. So just the blade shape to do the analysis. And then what we’ll do is we use the spectrum photographs preferably from a drain type to look at how about the contamination as gotcha. So sort of this, this hybrid
Allen Hall: [00:24:56] approach, you’re actually picking up the real blade surface, not that theoretical blade surface that would come out of the OEM.
You actually have a real blade surface.
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:25:04] Yeah. Uh, and I think that’s really important. Yeah. Um, I don’t know whether you’ve been in a blade factory, but, um, When the bikes come out of the mold, that’s quite low of, um, how should we say craftsmanship goes into finishing the blade, you know, like, you know, grinding the leading edge, finishing the trailer.
So even though it’s a molded products, There are differences. So actually having the real laser scan is quite helpful. Yeah, that makes sense. So, yeah, we just use that to feed the CFD Erik calculations
Allen Hall: [00:25:37] and your VG installation does not modify the blade structure at all. If you’re applying the VG with an adhesive, essentially.
There’s no need to review any structural structural aspects. This is just an add on glue to the surface type of
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:25:53] system, really simple to put on, and nowadays it doesn’t affect the structure. I mean, that, that plastic components that are very small, you know, you pick them up in your hand. So the entire kit is only adding a few kilos of muster the blade.
Um, because that plastic set of plastic components, they’re very compliant. So they’re just going to move with the blades. Now they’re not, they’re not going to be applying any load. They’re not attracting any stress. So yeah, completely benign structurally. Um, the
Allen Hall: [00:26:22] technicians needed to install it. Do they require any additional level of training before they would install these parts
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:26:28] from a product specific point of view?
We give some training because even though the texts may well be familiar with vortex generators, I’ll accept because we use a wet to D serve, you know, perhaps we want their diesel put on in a different pattern to another. Arianne provider or something. So we typically give a training course just a few hours, just take them through our installation, manual shamans and demo parts.
So in terms of like, you know, getting up on the blade, how to post a form or know that the techs are all experts at doing that, it’s just the product specifics, you know, we want to make sure that
Dan: [00:27:03] gotcha. Okay. Gotcha. And so you, you touched on something. Uh, you said they only add a couple of kilos to the total blade surface.
Um, and that would be a really big problem if there was a ton of weight. So are, have there been, uh, cause I’ve heard stories that maybe some other companies have these really heavy aerodynamic ad-ons that can maybe change the blade in a really negative way. Long-term.
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:27:30] Yeah. I mean, that’s, I mean, it’s something that, yeah, you do have to be careful because obviously that blades had a lot of attention paid to it, structurally.
Um, so if you start doing something drastic, you’ve got to watch out. And there was, uh, some cases of, uh, very large spoilers. Um, so. Kind of thing like you might see on the back of your car, I guess it, with a flick, um, being installed in the root region of the blade, uh, to be left or maybe collapse that, but those parts were so big and stiff that they’re actually introducing some similar, cool cracking light, no like canoes, what bigger than can we use these really massive components?
So if they’re attractive or load, um, and we don’t want to a trunk load, you just want to stay smaller light. Compliance. So that’s why, you know, the atoms that power could provide. So yeah, that’s that full, you know, we just, we don’t anything structural. We don’t don’t to touch it. Yeah,
Dan: [00:28:27] absolutely.
Allen Hall: [00:28:35] your VGs are slightly different in terms of shape and size than other VGs we’ve seen on the marketplace. What makes your VGs a little bit, a little more
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:28:43] unique. I think. The key. The key thing is, is actually why you put that that’s going to really drive, um, how well they perform and therefore how much energy they’re going to recover from things like contamination and erosion.
So. Typically, if you go into, into a wind farm, you may see voltage generators down in the region. Let’s say in a third of the plate, that’s pretty common, a lot of the area to put them on in the factory. What you don’t see very often as vortex generators that extend any further out on the blade. So that’s a really key thing about what power curve do we, we focus on the outer part of the blade.
Because that’s where all the money’s made, you know, that’s where all the energy has been created at the outer 50% of the blame might be producing the 70 plus percent of the energy. So that’s where you should spend your, your time and your money. So if you have ocean and contamination, It’s going to be affecting the alcohol part.
So therefore we focus our products on mitigating this performance loss that you’re going to see more on the outer parts of the blade. So, so that’s a key difference. Um, and also we, we put our auto extract is typically in a different quarter wise position to, to some of our competitors. And I would say that’s probably down to the fact that we’ve done a lot of winter testing and simulation.
So we’ve actually been able to. Maybe understand and optimize the product a little bit more than, than some other songs. I wouldn’t say I’m wrong because you know, there are some great, great products from Amazon, but I think we’ve, we’ve got a really good hand on it. I don’t think as many people know more about Fiji’s than we do, and those VGs
Allen Hall: [00:30:28] being on the outer half out a third of the blade can.
Fix a lot of other issues with the blade. Can you, you want her to describe what VGs can do in terms of just recovery of, of, uh, leading edge erosion damage? How do V can you put VGs on a blade and not necessarily fix the leading edge erosion issues? Just
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:30:52] leave it. Yeah. Um, yeah, you can’t, I mean, I’m never going to advocate you just sort of, uh, Put it on, I’m forget because you know, the PG is going to stop her engine happening so you can lead the leading edge as long as it’s not a structural issue.
And to be honest, mostly the direction isn’t a structural issue. Right. You know, top coat. The problem is that that’s causing aerodynamic, uh, loss, you know, this kind of one, two, 3% we were talking about earlier. So. If you put the VGs on, they’ll recover a chunk of that loss and then, yeah, fine. , don’t worry about fixing it, but you know, like with any big component, keep doing your regular inspections because if you start finding that erosion is stunted to get a hole on the structure or put a crack in.
Well, yeah, of course you’ve got a fixed or, but yeah. Then you’d, you just have so much more flexibility because you’re not just going up every, you know, one year to try to fix a few Penn homes because it doesn’t matter anymore. The VGs are looking after the flood. Right?
Allen Hall: [00:31:59] So you have a very low cost, uh, aerodynamic fix or upgrade to compensate for a much more costly long-term repair that what may or may not eventually happen depending on the age of the
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:32:12] blades.
Yeah, exactly. You know, there’s. Uh, one way to think about it is the fact that the VGs are just making your performance more robust. So they’re going to recover losses when they occur. Uh, and that always going to be there doing that. So if you have a particularly, you know, uh, dirt filled or Buckfield summer parent, where am I need to do anything different with the veggies or just recovery, more energy?
Um, so it is this sort of nice constant way of, of keeping a powerful high, whereas without Fiji’s hopes that, uh, bugs ice, all these things that can be quite seasonal, they can affect your power curve. You know, you’re going to get this season seasonal variation, new power curve. So you can imagine whether it VG is you’re going to sort of basically reduce the magnitude of that, that fluctuation.
Push your average Powell up.
Allen Hall: [00:33:04] So essentially, yeah, at that point, your, your buffer, your angle of attack, buffer, stall, buffer just gets greatly widened. Right. So you’re just kind of wiping away that sensitivity you’re taking away the sensitivity that, that the OEM is sort of designed into the blade. You’re erasing a large, or just expanding that, that buffer zone, which is
magnificent.
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:33:23] Okay. Yeah. So, I mean, if we, yeah, if we go back to that store margin parameter, A vortex generator will typically increase the stall margin by three degrees. You know, that would be a good, a good rule of thumb. So suddenly you’ve got all this extra margin to play with where. Your performance, isn’t going to suffer because you’re falling off the top of the line, right?
Hmm.
Dan: [00:33:43] Hmm. So let’s, let’s shift here to, uh, the other two upgrades. So gurney flaps and trailing its duration. So how are they different from vortex generators and where do they find their unique, uh, sort of application within this whole ecosystem of, uh,
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:33:59] yeah, actually I think I might start using the term ecosystem myself.
That’s that’s really nice. So, um, Yeah, we, we think about, yeah, this ecosystem, this, this menu of products that we can apply to fix different areas of the blade. So we’ve talked about VG has been used for energy recovery, um, but that can also be used to actually just, uh, fix poor, fundamental performance.
And that often happens in the room region of the blade where these thick air forms, which are required for that structure. The horrible aerodynamically, you know, so there’s a pretty slippery Vanessa. There’s a lot of drag, a lot of stool, so we can put VGs down in the root to help fix that. And that’s another area where we can apply a gurney flaps.
So what are going to be flat there? You can think of it as like an L shape typically. So it’s, um, Michael called disappointment sometimes. On a gurney flap sits on the trailing edge off the blade tip to you might be in a one third of the span. So down in this root region where we have the fake of foods that are already struggling for performance, because they’re just pretty, pretty fat basically.
So what they’re going to be flat does is it boosts the lift with that local section producers for the same flight. So let’s say without going in week out, um, A-list coefficient of one, but we put a guidance by Paul. Maybe we’ll go left coffees. And at one point, so like a 20% lift boost. Um, but yeah, that’s focused in the region and then not dependent on the surface condition, the, any flat boost left, no matter what the surfaces is clean or dirty or whatever.
So, so yeah, I like to split it up until I write region our region. So root region. Gurney flaps and vortex generators, uh, to help with these really thick aerofoils and then not surface condition dependent. So they’ll always work out more part of the blade. Airflow is much thinner, much better aerodynamically, but they suffered from contamination and erosions.
That’s where I slow speed to highest. So erosions worse depositions. So the VGs are there, uh, for recovery. So recovery outboard. Biggest thing basically, um, the serrations, um, that’s like the third main product that, that power curve offers, um, therefore noise reduction primarily. So when, when a turbine is operating, you hear that swooshing sound, uh, as the blaze truffles, that’s, that’s an aerodynamic noise that’s coming from.
The boundary layer, um, interacting with the trailing edge of the wind turbines. So this boundary layer is, is hitting the trajectory of these pressure waves. And it seemed to try to gauge that being scattered they’re emitting sound. So what a serration does, you can imagine it just like a sore tooth. Um, When you put the dissertations on the trailing edge of the wind turbine, what they’re doing is that ultra hold scattering mechanism of how that noise is being distributed.
So if we change that scattering mechanism, what we’re able to do is, is reduce the overall sound power level of the turbine. So we basically reduce the coherence of, um, of the sound. So. The noise goes with the fifth power of local capacity. So it’s hugely dependent on flow speed. So serrations, I like the hour to one third of the blade, 20 to 30% of the plate, something like that because in border that, yeah, sorry.
Should most don’t work. But its contribution to the overall turbine noises is just so much smaller because of this fifth power relationship we have. So yeah.
Dan: [00:37:52] and so then the main relationship between serrations and an AEP is that when they’re quieter, they can run them faster. Is that, is that yeah. I mean basically
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:38:01] when, when you have a turbine, um, that doesn’t meet a local noise regulation.
And in my Spanish, this is typically more of a say European problem. Most of the times that the regulations tend to be a little bit different, but yeah, so mine doesn’t meet the local requirements. So that’s the scenario. What the operator will then do is probably at certain times of the day or night actually deteriorate the turbine.
So it’s producing less energy, but also producing the less sand. So you might think. Okay, great problem solved. The problem is that that might be costing you several percent AEP, you know, three, four, 5% AP. And maybe because you’re not solving the problem, right. You’re basically just turning the turbine down when you want less noise.
Um, so, so what serration do is doing is it’s addressing the root cause of the problem, which is this, this acoustic scattering and the trailing edge. So. But , don’t have to direct your turbine anymore. You get AP
Dan: [00:39:03] based, I guess they don’t probably get applied to blades that are in really remote areas. It’s the only ones that are more local and around residents.
Yeah. I mean,
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:39:14] the serrations whilst designed for noise reduction have like a secondary function if required. So if you imagine this thing sticking off the train, If you bend it slightly, then it acts like a, one of the flaps you’ll see on an aircraft as you take it off. So you increase, uh, the CAMBA. I’m gonna try an inch.
You’ll get more lift. The big question is, do you want more lift? So depending on how that blade was designed to begin with how optimal it is, et cetera, you may find that attic lift does next to nothing or in the worst case, maximum performance worse. Sure. So yeah, serrations do have this sort of almost, yeah.
This functionality to what’s left, but then why that gives you more performance as a much more subtle, uh, discussion, you know, you have to do a deep dive on the aerodynamic. Right.
Allen Hall: [00:40:11] Is that something that you model
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:40:13] the services? Yeah, exactly. Um, um, we, we done quite a lot of weddings on testing on serrations, um, customer that’s the industry standard way to validate this kind of product.
But we can also use, uh, the CFD and competition flow dynamics. So we validated our CFD model with the winter. So we confidently give them the same results. And that means we could take any new blood, run it through our CFD and be confident that we understand how it’s going to change the loan. Great.
Dan: [00:40:45] So I know that there’s one other main, uh, upgrade that maybe is falling out of favor.
I’m sure there’s a little more controversial whether or not it works. And I guess there’s two, one or blade tip extensions, you know, chopping off the tip of the blade and making a longer. And then also winglets. Um, but like I said, it w Al and I have talked about this on the show, and it seems like the jury still out that they’re a little questionable.
There’s just so many potential. Trade-offs essentially lengthening, uh, the blade. Uh we’re. Where do you fall on that debate? Just gender. Yeah. I
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:41:17] mean, I think we take the tip extensions first. Um, Aerodynamically. That’s fairly straightforward to understand because effectively it’s a bigger rotor and a bigger rotor means more power, and that’s a pretty straightforward relationship, the square of your area plus, or minus some correction factors.
So there’s no doubt. They’ll add ADP. The big question is. Do you want to chop off the tip of your blade and bond off in this new structure? Are you confident that the inboard structure can take, uh, the additional bending moments they’re going to be generated by, by putting that typic stench? And that’s ignoring all the permitting things.
Now, a lot of wind farms, there’s a specified tech time, so you can actually go above. So, so that sort of maybe says, well, maybe that pushes me towards a winner because then maybe got the opportunity to flip the blade. I would stay with any, within any permit regulations and on a waiting that effectively acts quite similar to a, to a blade extension.
So the windlass has some advantages in terms of, you can have a smaller thing than a tip extension. It’s not adding rotor area. The problem is that the know, again, you know, the jury’s still out in, is it a good trade off? Between AP unloads and structural modification. So I would say you will get more AP for a month from away from the tip extension, but do you want to chop off the tip?
Uh, is the, is the structural performance of the original blade known enough that you’re confident changing it quite so dramatically? So I think small things like within path, me to want me to. The risk is pretty low. Um, and we’ll get some AP, if you go in much bigger than that, again, you know, we’ll talking earlier about this canoe spoiler that was applied in the room.
You’ve got to be really sure. You’re not going to start cracking the blade and damaging the light because then it doesn’t matter whether you go to some AP to cuss. If you’ve got to take your blade down, that’s
Dan: [00:43:29] anytime if it wipes out. Yeah. Well, I think that segues well into our next topic, which is. You know, there’s a lot of, uh, ideas and new, and this is, you know, Alan’s talked about this on the aircraft side, that there’s lots of like, Hey, this is gonna make sense.
Let’s install this on our whole fleet of planes or our whole wind site. And then a couple of years down the road, they figured, ah, you know, that wasn’t, that didn’t really pan out in practice as well as it did maybe in the wind tunnel or something. But, um, with, you know, you guys studyings and, and improving so many blades, what are some of the things you’ve learned along the way as a.
As a company and, uh, you know, and, and industry-wide, I, I would say as a whole, how has, how have things changed as you’ve learned more over the last five, 10 years
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:44:12] Korean? And one of the key things in terms of our performance is the understanding and appreciation of, of this contamination. I think that’s come on a lot in recent years.
So when we were back using store regulated turbines, It was pretty clear that they suffered really badly when the plates were dirty and you can see it super clearly and the power curves and the SCADA data. When we started going to these modern picture regulated machines, um, it becomes less obvious say it’s just harder to find one, 2% losses in the data.
But I think with a lot of work by a lot of research institutions, such as, you know, the Danish tank or university, there’s a lot more. Just acceptance that that does cause a measurable performance loss. So I think when people start accepting it, there’s then a lot more focus on what you do to solve it. So, you know, things like the vortex generators, you know, are coming up in conversation a lot more.
And you know, for me personally, you know, I’ve been in the industry around 11 years now, I guess I’ve just been quite surprised that. How slow the uptake has been on some of these automatic upgrades. So in some ways, you know, we’re talking about, you know, what have I learned in a way it’s like, I’ve learned that things, maybe aren’t moving as fast as they should have to, you know, um, because if, if it’s this accepted, understood problem or more, why aren’t people doing more to fix it?
I don’t know. That’s can be all kinds of financial and commercial decisions behind it. But if I take it just from an engineering perspective, Uh, it makes the flow bad. You can make the flow better. So why wouldn’t you, you know, there’s a lot of money in one person.
Dan: [00:46:04] Oh, sure. There is. Yeah. Well, it seems like those are tough challenges in all industries where you have to convince people that they need a service that is going to make sense financially in the long run, but has maybe an initial upfront investment,
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:46:16] you know, if we’re talking about changes in the last five years, like, you know, how’s how things progressed to computational.
Cost of big CFD simulations, big structural simulations. That’s absolutely plummeted. So now, you know, even a small company like power curve, we can run full blade CFD simulations in a couple of hours because we use a cloud computing service. You know, we can access a thousand cores of computing power. So very little money.
So that’s enabled us to really take this super detailed analysis approach on these problems. So as an engineer, it was just wonderful because, you know, having that kind of CPU power just unlocks this sort of Wonderland of, of kind of simulations, you can carry out and, and that’s something else. Yeah.
Taking the last five years has made a huge difference to them. Gotcha.
Dan: [00:47:12] Well, could you, uh, could you sort of walk us through, like, imagine, you know, you’re sitting down with myself and Alan and we’re on board. Can you walk us through the, the sort of start to finish process of, you know, getting a power curve kit installed?
Sure. I mean,
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:47:27] I think step point, it’s always this, this really open, transparent discussion with the customer. It’s about educating first and foremost. Why, why do you have a problem and what are the mechanisms behind it? And then what’s appropriate for a fix. I think a big problem in the industry as a whole is that it’s quite closed.
Sometimes OEMs can be pretty reluctant to, to talk about some of this stuff. Um, so we like to educate, you know, we like to say why you’ve got a problem. So we can show him Tom’s on CFD. First of all, convince you that what we’re doing is his sense from being professional about it. What we’ll then do we’ll take any scar data from your turbine.
If you have it, look for these very small reductions. And sometimes we find them. Sometimes we don’t depends on quality of the SCADA data and how much you’ve got. What would I do? Take any blade inspection data? Like I said, if it’s from a drone, that’s absolutely perfect. And we’ll, we’ll look at it, you know, an overview of the entire blade and how damaged it is or contaminated it is.
We’ll then do like a very initial assessment to say, is it worth taking this to the next level of analysis? And most of the time it is. So at that point, we’ll get the blade geometry from the laser scan. If we don’t have it already or on the CFD simulations or correlate to our wind tone datasets. When we have these really wonderful in-house tools we developed with the Danish technical university to actually then estimate what is the performance loss, the turbine, as a result of what we see that’s I have two graphs and then what we do is we can produce a report, share the customer and say, here’s, here’s your problem?
Here’s your potential loss. This is the manual upgrades that we have available and the expected performance increase. Um, what we typically find, uh, is we can add between two and 4% AEP depending on the turbine and what energy is, what conditioner is, et cetera. So that’s, that’s the kind of offering we have to the customer.
So we make sure we, we go through the business case with them. Usually it’s pretty attractive because now a couple of us in AP is a lot of money. And then what we’ll do is we’ll. Production installation manual. We’ll engage a local installation company and give them the necessary training we talked about earlier.
They’ll go and install the case on the turbine, their trial period, typically because often the customer wants their own data set to validate things working that goes fine. You don’t go to them to the rollout phase. So all in all, you’re probably looking at sort of a. 12 to 18 month process from first engagement through to doing the analysis.
Uh, getting the trial, getting the trial data, validating it, and then, and then doing the
Allen Hall: [00:50:29] loan. So what’s the return on investment for that approach? Like when can they recoup their, the money for all the time? And the, I would
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:50:35] say the average is about three years. Um, that’s really good. Yeah. So it’s clearly very dependent on local power price, but yeah, around the sort of two, three year Mark is what we commonly see and.
That means on most turbines, we look at which most, the ones that upgraded so far, sort of seven to 10 years old as a starting point, you’ve then got another, maybe 10 years of lifetime where it’s free money. So customers don’t tend to. Tends to be pretty pleased.
Dan: [00:51:09] I bet. Yeah. Is there any maintenance, I mean, do they collect us or dirt or, I mean, is there like, what do they have to do, you know, for the duration that they’re on their blade in
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:51:19] a, in principle?
And I think so the components are manufactured and designed to last a full lifetime of a turbine. So they’re made from very environmentally resistant plastic. So there’s no issues with UV degradation, things like that. So, and as I said, because we use a wet today, sieve. That bond as a, as a lifetime bond as well.
It doesn’t mean surfacing. What you sometimes see is in places as some extreme weather events, like, you know, really bad hail storms or super heavy ice icing at the turbines, some of the VG fins, uh, might get damaged. So as part of your main blade inspection routine, you should check if there’s any significant damage due to use extreme weather events.
We don’t see a lot. Um, Yeah, I like the components. If you hit it with a, you know, a golf ball size hail stone, or a few times,
Dan: [00:52:14] it’s not sledgehammer resistant.
Uh, and so Nick, you you’ve, you’ve mentioned, you know, with, uh, you know, getting your analysis and laser scanning. You’ve mentioned that drones make your life a lot easier doing that, which obviously makes a ton of sense. Sending people up on ropes on these huge machines is such a, such a much bigger hassle.
Like let’s let the, let the robots do it. Um, can you tell us a little bit about how, how drones are changing, what you do.
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:52:53] That first and foremost, it’s about just getting this understanding of the blade surface in a really good level of detail. Um, so Powerco, we we’ve been working on sky specs, for example, uh, for a little while looking at how can we use this incredible data set that’s been captured, uh, with, uh, the high resolution images.
To drive a turbine specific performance calculation. So I talked about, you know, as making this kind of, uh, you know, engineering desk study about what’s the right condition, how does that affect performance and running the models? Well, I can see in the, not too distant future, uh, as being able to take the drone inspection data, that being categorized, you know, with a piece of AI software, That cast crisis are dynamically in terms of severity.
And then that goes straight in to performance calculation based on that turbine specific image set. So what you could get is for every time you fly a drone around a turbine or every different turbine, you get a new AP calculation done for that turbine, with that data set. And that, that suddenly becomes really exciting because.
You can monitor things. You can track them every time you do a fly by basically the cost of the Australian inspections is getting lower all the time as well. So linking this data set into a calculation engine that delivers a turbine specific AP or results. It’s something that we’re actively working on now.
And hopefully we can, we can share more with, with the industry. Later, later this year,
Allen Hall: [00:54:33] the drone data is becoming more ubiquitous and it just, there’s just so much data on so many turbines and so many blades at this point. How do you, do you try to group them together in terms of like where the terminals are located in terms of the types of damage that they’re seeing and what the F the aerodynamic.
Upgrades would be, is it, is it location specific? Is it manufacturer specific? How do you, how do you sort of group that
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:54:56] in your head? Probably first and fourth, most it’s going to be the location, I would say. So, um, Right. And fall plays a big role, um, because rainforest erosion, it’s those, those raindrops being hit by the leading edge, you might, you know, 150 miles an hour.
I left no boats, right? So the amount of rainfall in a year, uh, is a big driver of erosion, but then also just spark contaminants and things. So that’s obviously very time specific location specific. Um, we then maybe want to let them down and we’ll think about, you know, individual manufacturers. So some manufacturers use off the shelf airfoils and we use customer foils and they perform differently when they’re contaminated or eroded.
So we have not has some particular blades that we know don’t like erosion and we have not had some bites. You know, it’s not to the same patentee levels as this others. Yeah, Dave, that’s something. We keep an eye and I’ll have this, like our initial
Allen Hall: [00:56:02] assessment, an operator in the Northern lattice fears of the United States where it rains a lot, say Seattle and Jordan hedges are front of your neighbors out in the West coast where there’s a lot of rain all the time.
There’s a. Uh, a direct correlation, like, you know, that part of the world is going to be erosion and it’s, that’s a slam dunk in terms of aerodynamic upgrades could eliminate a lot of issues in those ways.
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:56:29] Yeah. It’s, it’s pretty likely, I mean, unfortunately, um, Like the quality of the leading edge, you know, the surface protection has, you know, that that’s going to skew your results somewhat.
So, you know, you might have this really nicely made leading edge with good protection that sat next to a turbine that doesn’t, and they expense the same rain and, you know, want to roads one doesn’t. So. Again, we have to think in generalizations and rules of thumb, but there’s always quite all. Acception is federal because effectively the leading edge is a handmade product, you know?
So it’s got that, that human variability in surface quality and craftsmanship and also different materials. Somebody said LEP or others don’t so we can, yeah, we can take some guidelines, some, some generalizations, but yeah. That’s why it’s nice to have the drain data because you don’t have to guess. You just look
Allen Hall: [00:57:22] and the difference between offshore turbines and on-shore Turmans in terms of the aerodynamic upgrades, are they essentially the same sort of upgrades?
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:57:31] Yeah, fundamentally. So we would apply, uh, to apply a phone on you’ve, uh, VGs gunny flap serrations as well, the turbines on or off shore. Um, Again, generalizing a little bit. Offshore turbines will often see more reduction on shore because of this, uh, this highly salty environment, you know, more rainfall, higher wind speeds, all this kind of stuff.
Um, on the flip side, when we think about serrations, that may be not as relevant off shore.
Dan: [00:58:06] Right. Shark sharks are not bothered by, by the station. No, no,
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:58:11] not, not in the ones that interviews shark week. Come on. So yeah, I mean, onshore and offshore. Fundamentally, you know, the economic issues are the same, but you may have yeah. Maybe some slightly more severe erosion. On average, when you go off, you’re
Allen Hall: [00:58:26] getting more data, drone data from offshore because the risks are so much higher and the cost associated with damage is so much harder to repair.
There’s just more data coming off shore right now than onshore. Or w where’s the data coming from
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:58:40] today? I would say still. The dominant data was onshore, but that’s, that’s more just because there are so many more turbines on it. Sure. But in terms of the, the motivation for drone inspection, definitely being really driven by, by off shore, you know, so.
Safety is just so critical. And you know, I live in the UK. The North sea is not a nice place to be much heavier. You don’t want to be on a boat. You don’t want to be hanging from a rope if you don’t need to. So I think the off shore and stress really going to push the robotics, not just in terms of inspection, but in terms of maintenance as well and repair.
I think they’re really going to take the lead there because it’s just, yeah. This really safety, critical and cost critical environment. Yeah.
Dan: [00:59:27] Well, it’s good. You brought that up. You’re uh, you’re just, you’re helping me in my segues so much here. Um, speaking of, of tech and keeping workers safe and all this, what are some of your predictions for, uh, the future of wind power and technology?
Well, I think,
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:59:42] um, yeah, the drawing conversation I’ve just had, that’s, that’s super relevant for this future. Um, it’s about getting good data and, and, and making things safer. I don’t see turbines getting any smaller. So, um, I mean, it’s a bit of a running joke in the industry really, where someone makes a prediction about a beggar rotor.
Are we to have prediction proved wrong a few years later? No, I used to work a vest doesn’t pupil like, ah, can we really transport a 50 meter blade? Is that, can we really do that? And then now people don’t have to plate, so yeah, they’re going to get bigger. Um, but on shore, My feeling is again at the risk of sounding silly in five years, we’re sort of getting to the limit of onshore sizes.
Not because we can’t deal with it, but it’s just such a big structure to, to have on land. Whereas on, on offshore, build them on a dock, send them straight out to sea. It’s much, much easier. So, yeah, size, uh, and then I think smart control utilizing these new data sources. So. As turbines get bigger. What’s a really interesting problem is the fact that you have such a varying load distribution over this writer.
You know, these things are 200 meter diameter. Oh sure. You can imagine the wind speed at the top of the rotor is very, very different from, from the wind speed at the bottom and from side to side. Sure. So how’d you deal with that? And I think the advent of more smart sensors, uh, such as fiber optics, for example, they’re going to allow you to measure a lot more in real time.
So you can imagine a blade that’s fully tricked out with loads of sensors and can measure where the blade position is. Maybe you’ve got a LIDAR on top of them. The it can actually see what wind is coming to the turbine. And you could use these two data sources together to basically get the turbine to react, um, in advance of some of this, uh, this gust coming in, for example.
So I just think sensors are going to play a really huge role. Like they are in a lot of, um, technology, you know, why now cost is plummeting capability is rising. So it’s just about integrating into this, um, this turbine platform, right? Whereas my blade what’s, what’s it doing? How can I monitor its health?
How can I pitch it so that the loads stay within a certain level? And it’s all about just driving down the cost of energy. Um, Maintenance, these kinds of things. Sure.
Allen Hall: [01:02:24] We find every site technology edge and the size of the turbines have gotten so big and the cost of turbines along with it that these instrumentation systems relatively speaking in terms of cost are inconsequential.
But like you said, they can really extend the life. They will extend the lifetime of blades and the whole structure considerably. As soon as you essentially have active. Pitch systems that are smart and, and you have LIDAR on top of it. Boy, that, that just extends everything out in terms of lifetime, because it reduces those extreme events significantly.
It’s a huge change it’s going to happen.
Nicholas Gaudern: [01:03:01] Yeah. I just think you, you know, using the stage was a big challenge. Like big data is such a buzzword, but you know, that that’s a, that’s a problem because so many companies OEMs, they have huge amounts of data. And they don’t use it today. You know, that they might have 50 cents on a turbine file.
They actually using that data. I bet quite a lot of them aren’t as leaders in the field, somebody, the operators super smart. But again, it’s just about bringing up the level in the industry of using data in a smart way. Like, can I predict a gearbox failure before it happens? Can I pet your blade before?
You know, Augusta. So all these kinds of things are they’re going to get more important as you know, you want to really try to squeeze every last drop of energy and cost out of the system. Well,
Dan: [01:03:52] Nick, this was a great conversation and, uh, you know, we really appreciate you coming on the show to, to give us a glimpse into what power curve is doing.
Can you give us, uh, some ways for our listeners and our viewers here on YouTube to follow up with you and with the company. And obviously for those of you listening, we’ll put links in the show notes and the description in YouTube. So you can easily click through to a, to learn more about power curve and about, uh, Nicholas here, but can you point us in the right direction?
Nicholas Gaudern: [01:04:18] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, um, we, we have a website, um, link up full powercurve.dk. Uh, there’s, there’s a contact form on there. You can reach out, uh, you can find me on LinkedIn as well, very happy to accept, uh, messages, invitations through LinkedIn for you to, um, be, to make contacts. And then, you know, like I say, it’s all about, it’s very personalized discussion, you know, what is, what turbine have you got?
What problem might you have and how do we fix it? So, You’re not going to get a generic sales brochure. Um, you’re going to talk to one of our team personally, um, again, to make sure that we, we give you exactly what’s what’s best for your wind farm. Like, say we don’t just have this one product we’re gonna, we’re going to ship you again to, to make sure we optimize it for your needs.
Yeah, that’s
Dan: [01:05:05] awesome. Well, Nick, thanks so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Great catching up with you.
Nicholas Gaudern: [01:05:09] Yeah. Absolute pleasure. Thanks. Thanks for great questions. Great, great conversation. And um, yeah, maybe we can do it again sometime. Absolutely.
