Is it possible for wind turbine blade aerodynamics to improve as a blade wears down? Nicholas Gaudern, CTO of Power Curve, joins us to talk about vortex generators, Gurney Flaps and the ins and outs of blade aerodynamic upgrades. We also discuss new migratory bird laws in the U.S. that may impact wind farms, undersea exploration tech, a collapsed Nordex turbine in Germany, and more.
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TRANSCRIPT EP82 Vortex Generators: How & Why Do They Work to Improve Blade Aerodynamics?
This episode is brought to you by weather guard lightning tech at Weather Guard. We make lightning protection easy. If you’re wind turbines or do for maintenance or repairs, install our strike tape retrofit LPS upgrade. At the same time, a strike tape installation is the quick, easy solution that provides a dramatic, long lasting boost to the factory lightning
protection system. Forward thinking wind site owners install strike tape today to increase uptime tomorrow. Learn more in the show notes of today’s podcast. Welcome back. I’m Dan Blewett
I’m Allen Hall,
and I’m Rosemary Barnes,
and this is the uptime podcast bringing you the latest in wind energy, tech news and policy. All right, welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your co-host, Dan Blewett. On today’s show, we’ve got a great lineup.
Also an amazing guest, Nicholas Gaudern, who is the chief technical officer from Power Curve, is back on with us today. He’s going to chat later on in the show about vortex generators and some other belayed aerodynamic upgrades. He’s a whiz when it comes to aerodynamics, so we’re excited to have him and his expertize back on the show
. Before that, we’ll talk a little bit about EC1 or some of their Kedron technology, checking on wind farms and the aquatic wildlife beneath. We’ll talk about migratory birds, some new legislation or really just the law. Looks like it’s changing again here in the U.S. We’ll talk about some of the implications there for wind turbines, Rehame birds.
And then after our interview, we’ll talk Germany. There was Nordic wind turbine collapse recently. Not much on it as far as causes. We’ll talk about that sort of as an industry wide issue, like why do we not know some of these things?
And some of it seems like it’s kept kind of close to the vest. We’ll also talk about blackouts potentially in Germany. Their electricity supplies seem tenuous at times, and some interesting advertisements have been sort of driving that point home with their own people.
And lastly, we’ll talk about a U.S. congressman proposing some funding programs for wind and solar here in the U.S. So first, I’ll start with Equador. Allen, you seem pretty keen on this technology they have been putting out there.
There are drone running around and collecting a bunch of data. So tell us, Allen, what’s some of the stuff that they’re looking for here on these offshore wind farms?
Well, they’re looking to see what the sea life is right now before they start investing and in a lot of offshore wind and to try to get a baseline for what the sea life is and what the vegetation is and what the migratory patterns are in some cases.
So they’re basically putting out these looks like little boat drones are about six feet, two meters long, and they have a solar panel onto them and they’re self-propelled and they relay data back to shore, but they’re just tracking the wildlife in the area.
Very similar that we would do on land. When we put wind turbines on land. We track the migratory birds, we track the wildlife. We make sure that where we sight these wind turbines, for the most part, it’s not going to cause a a problem with a wildlife.
So this is very interesting because we haven’t seen it much, particularly in the United States. And we’re destined to put up literally thousands of turbines out in the ocean in a place near me, where there’s a lot of sea life and we don’t have that sort of data.
So it’s interesting that the Europeans are already way ahead of us. And Rosemary. Do you see that same thing happen being down in Australia as offshore wind starts to come in your area, too?
Well, offshore wind hasn’t come to Australia yet. There’s quite a few projects that are in development. And I think that we are going to get some announcements in the next year or two. But where yeah, probably we’ve got nothing to monitor currently, so it wouldn’t be the right place to do it.
But I think it is good to get as much information as possible. You know, I think the community is always really concerned about animal life and how it’s affected by new developments. So if you can, you know, the impacts ahead of time, you’re less likely to be reacting to something bad that happened after you install, you know
, a billion dollar wind farm or something. So I like to say that, you know, technology technology making it easier to get more information.
Yeah. So this glider is interesting because it so it’s a drone, but it has a glider component, so it can just be pushed around via the wind. So it’s pretty interesting. And then obviously it also has some solar panels on top of it.
So, you know, it’s got that autonomous component to it where it’s a little bit self powered and it can sort of potter around. And, you know, I guess some of the things they’re looking for are fluorescence of chlorophyl others, you know, other measurements that are just sort of saying, hey, how’s the zooplankton?
How’s, you know, are we forming an ecosystem down here where there’s things for, you know, fish to eat? And are we seeing like growth and like a bloom here? So. Alan, I mean, we’ve talked at length about sort of like these ecosystems where you could have a, you know, a sea lab and this and that.
And the other thing is, it seems like kind of in that same vein where, hey, let’s see what’s going on so we can kind of like maybe they find some stuff in there like, hey, we can cultivate this.
Maybe if this stuff is happening, if we did this, this and this or restructured some of these structures underneath, you know, you could always add things where maybe it encourages certain mussels or shellfish. I’m going to expose my lack of of of shellfish knowledge here.
But, you know, you could you could you could probably extrapolate something from this data and say, hey, maybe if we do this, this and this, we can get more of what we’re already seeing.
Yeah, I think one of the interesting pieces is. We don’t know all that much about the migrant migratory habits of fish and large, since we kind of do like we’re learning now that sharks tend to travel the world and so do whales.
Twenty years ago, we really didn’t didn’t know that story tagging them. I think when we run into that same situation, when we start actually measuring wildlife, fish migration in places we haven’t really look, we’re going to learn a lot about about the sea life that we’ve never considered before, and that will come back around to change the
way we design winter image. I guarantee you those first 100, 200 turbines get out there are not going to look exactly like the last 100 or 200 turbines that get placed out there because we’re going to learn so much.
And that’s good. We should be doing that engineering wise. We should be doing that.
So speaking of migration here in the U.S., the Biden administration is moving to again make it illegal to accidentally kill migratory birds. So the Trump administration tried to roll this back. And Alan, you have some strong thoughts about this.
So obviously, the way the U.S. is with the political sphere here in the news cycle, it’s very like, oh, they did this and this was bad. And now this new administration, there’s always like this. But it seems like there’s there’s both sides to this story that maybe some of the reasons the Trump administration role rolled this legislation
back was maybe not all bad. Is that how you’ve kind of interpreted this
if you read the press about it? It praises Sabai administration and it dumps on the Trump administration. It says the judge in the situation was tremendous and the decision to do X, Y, Z, and then you actually start reading the briefs and you start reading the the memorandum that were generated, which started all this.
And what was what has transpired was the original law about wild migratory wildlife, birds in the United States, Mexico, Canada and in other countries was back in the early nineteen hundreds. Nineteen 15, 16, 17, 18. And the original laws from 1918 that birds are being killed by the tens of thousands or millions and for their feathers or
for their meat. So they’re being harvested, right. So there’s like hunters and out. They’re just really decimating large quantities of bird species that they pass a lot of to to stop that, to limit that. So there was this intent to sort of limit the amount of hunting and to control the hunting season, those kind of things.
In the 1970s, that same 1918 law got interpreted as if you and unintentionally kill a migratory bird, you could be held accountable for it. Now, what does that mean? Well, the war that started really and got enforced was during an oil spill.
So an oil tanker runs ashore, hits an iceberg, whatever it does, collides with another ship, starts leaking oil, and that comes on shore. And those migratory birds there. So the the oil company or the shipper can be held responsible for the the bird deaths that happen.
They’re not intentional, not like going out and shooting birds, but just an effect of the actions that they took. OK, so what the Trump administration was trying to resolve was the sort of unintentional bird death. And it really revolves around wind turbines on some level if a bird runs into a wind turbine.
The wind turbine operators responsible. Well, that they’re not out there intentionally trying to kill birds. That’s not the intent there. And so there was a lot of discussion about how to try to limit that or control that. They put some parameters around that.
And so the Trump administration had put a basically a memorandum together that said, hey, this law was never intended to deal with sort of a single death seabirds. It was dealt with in large quantities. And now what’s happened is the Bush administration is saying no wind turbine operators are going to be responsible for those deaths.
Now, I don’t think that’s necessarily a smart move in the United States, because the effect of that and there’s a consequence of that and Rosemary, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think what will happen is in places where they have migratory bird deaths of increasing quantities for whatever reason, the fact is, is that they’re going to
shut down those wind turbines. To stop those penalties from being applied, and when they shut down those wind turbines, the cost of electricity will rise like it did in Missouri recently with some bats that are. That happened down there.
Well, they stopped the wind turbines at night and asked for the rate payers to pay more for electricity when they did it. I think that’s going to become a more common. And as we go offshore, on northeast of the United States, on the shoreline where there’s more migratory birds, that’s just going to get amplified.
Do you see that as a possible outcome?
Maybe. But I also I mean, I’m a big bird lover. I go bird watching and everything I own. I own binoculars. It’s true. So either I probably
do that, OK?
Yeah, I have an app, so I don’t have to have the Australian Birds app and the European Birds app. And I log them. So, you know, like I’m pretty, pretty serious bird watcher. So I do tend to come down on the side of birds.
I mean, and biodiversity in general. It’s actually for me, that’s my motivation for being in renewables industry. So I am OK with having some limitations on on business to look after wildlife. And I’m also okay with electricity prices being a little higher.
There’s some weird, weird things about the law, though, that I don’t necessarily understand, because it’s only about migratory birds. So I’m I guess it would depend. Not every wind farm is killing migratory birds, that’s for sure. Like there’s certain certain places where they’re affected more than others.
I’m also surprised that, you know, if I’ve got to I’ve got to study up here about bird deaths due to, you know, human human causes. And in the U.S., you know, it’s number one cats. Number two, building windows, number three, automobiles, number four, power lines.
Number five, communication towers. And then, yeah, agricultural chemicals even is above wind turbines. And so and oil spills isn’t isn’t on there at all, although it’s probably mainland like on land causes. So it’s just weird because. Yes. So buildings and cars kill, you know, just vastly millions of times more birds, I think, actually are looking at the
numbers from cats, two point four billion per year in U.S. and wind turbines, 234 thousand. So, you know, like it’s a massive, massive difference in in scale. So that’s not migratory birds specifically. But I think that that’s interesting where we focus on bird deaths and where we don’t, which always makes me feel like it’s a bit of
a beat up. But on the other hand, we also have environmental protection laws, right. When you have side a wind farm or you plan an oil extraction project. You do assess the environmental impacts already. As far as I know, we don’t have some migratory bird law in Australia, but there’s plenty of wind farms and any other kind
of project that is, you know, stymied because of the effect on birds and especially endangered birds, which is what I’m more concerned about. So to me, that’s the right place to worry about or about birds. But I also just want to go back to the argument, you know, the difference between killing birds on purpose versus accidentally killing
them when it’s a business. And I mean, you can reasonably say that if there’s an oil spill, that that’s going to be a lot of birds killed. You know that wind turbines can kill birds if you don’t you know, if you put a wind farm up somewhere, you know that there’s an endangered bird that is likely to
be affected. I don’t see a big difference between, oh, we didn’t we didn’t put this wind farm in to kill the birds. I mean, you knew that they were going to be so. I definitely agree with siting appropriately so that you don’t have, you know, big environmental impacts on any kind of endangered animal.
But this this is a criminal penalty, right, Alan? I mean, what does that mean, a criminal like a criminal penalty in this case?
I think it’s defined as a misdemeanor, but it’s like fifteen thousand dollars per bird is what the penalty can be. So that’s a pretty quick and I think if you’re I think most people that are operating wind turbines, most companies are operating wind turbines are on the side of animals.
I don’t see them being a kids wildlife here. Like they’re trying to do things that are cleaning the environment, reducing carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide. And part of that is an environmental concern, too. And I just think you’re just sort of hurting the people that are trying to help on some level.
Like they know occasionally a bird is going to get near some things and you really can’t control where bird scholder wildlife by definition. So if a bird does accidentally run into a wind turbine and die, I’m not sure.
What does that force a legal proceeding? Does it need to?
Well, I mean, you’d start talking about what DE’s will pursue. I mean, there’s lots of stuff that they’re like, you know, we’re not going to go after this. So I don’t think they’re going to concern themselves with us.
Well, that’s
just that’s the price I
think the laws are probably.
Well, that’s the problem is that the Trump administration basically said that in the Biden administration saying, no, we’re going to go essentially we’re going to go after all those bad guys in the corporations.
So you’re just assuming that I mean, we don’t know that even if this is the new law, that they’re going to be actually trying to prosecute a company for Firebirds or Árpád Possumus. You’ve been out there monitoring that.
I think this is probably a more employees to say, hey, if there’s something really big going on now, we have the legal ability to do something about it or otherwise they wouldn’t because yeah, you’re I have to say, they don’t intend to.
And it’s they’re not in a place where they anticipate killing, but then they start killing tens of thousands because something unforeseen happens and birds are going right through it. Then they have a real big problem and now they have the legal recourse to do something about it.
Whereas if they just assume it’s only going to be a bird or two and then it’s not, then they don’t have a recourse. So I feel like that’s probably where this is going.
I hope you’re right, Dan.
All right. Well, we’re going to move on to our interview with chief technical officer of Power Curve, Nicholas Gaudern. So he is a blade aerodynamics expert. We’ve had him on the show before. He’s awesome. So we’re going to dove into all things vortex generators, gurney flaps, trailing edge serrations and really get a deep dove on his perspective on
the way. Aerodynamic power curve upgrades are changing in the industry. All right, Nick, thanks so much for coming back on the show, so let’s get started. I think the first thing we want to cover here with you is can you give us an explanation for those who don’t maybe know what vortex generators are?
So can you give us an overview of what they do and what they’re made of and how they help improve EIGRP for wind turbines?
Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, thanks for having me back on. So the vortex generator fundamentally kind of does what it says in Latin. So it generates a vortex. But the important thing is how does that and then what that vortex then does to the flight.
So most devices that are sticking up into a fly, whether it be a little triangle or Colonel SLAPP plane, it will create some kind of vortex. So you’ll have a flame that hits it. You know, you get a vortex roll at the top of it and then propagate it downstream.
So vortex generators, which are wind turbines, typically made from plastic injection, mold material. And they’re typically triangular in shape that you see a few variations of that. And then in a nutshell, why they are there is to increase the lift of the profile and aerodynamic profile.
And ideally to reduce the drag a little bit as well. So when you have air flowing over surface, such as an airfoil, the bit of air that is very close to the wall, we call the boundary boundaryless. And this is where the flooring goes from a zero velocity, not the wall up to the free, straight off stage
. So let’s go over the viscus effects go on. So the health of that boundary layer, this thin layer of slab dictates how well an Arab airfoil performs. And in many cases, you may get situations where this boundry starts to peel off the surface from the trailing edge of the air flow and we call the separation or stall
, things like that. And when this starts to happen, it’s bad for performance. So Vortex Generator sits there to basically inject energy into the boundary. So it’s effective. Dirac high energy fluid from away from the surface, pull it back down towards the surface, into the boundary, like give it more energy.
They can restore the health of that boundary layer so that it can remain attached and energetic all the way to the trailing edge. And by doing that, we can get a bit of the lift boost. We can delay, stall and get some positive effects on the AP.
So it seems like, you know, it’s pretty well known at this point that vortex generators, you know, do a good job increasing it up, you know, like the cat’s out of the bag. So, I mean, does every blade ship with these now right at the factory?
And if not, why not?
Yeah, that’s that’s a great question. So I think if you look in the last few years, the major manufacturers like Siemens, Vestas, G. They are shipping with at least some vortex generators installed. And I say some because there’s different kinds of voltage generators that sit in different parts of the blind.
So what we do is we just think about those those different styles you see. So if we break it down into regions of the planet, typically you will see voltage generators on the to Leewood surface, suction surface of the rotor adornments behind the wind.
As you as you’re looking at the rotor, pretty much all of the big molten blades are going to see Fijis installed on the suction surface down in the region. So like in a 30 to 50 percent tops or something in that region.
And the reason those voltage generators are there and we can get into the details later is because the flow quality in that power plant is generally pretty poor. Therefore, it was a really thick they’re not very good astronomically.
And the bijoux help performance. So kind of a no brainer. It’s well understood. It’s in the literature, it’s been tested, say. So that put that the outpoured region of the blade is a little bit harder, because if the blade is really well designed and it’s squeaky clean, then typically a vortex generator isn’t going to pay off to
increase the performance by any meaningful amount when it’s installed on the outer 50 percent. So manufacturers can typically be a little bit reluctant to put in there because you’re not going to really see much happening that goes out or they really come into their own whenever the blade is suboptimal.
And by suboptimal, I mean, it’s got a better paint job. The molded surface isn’t so good. It was made on a Friday night and you know, it’s been finished and not such a great way and even more critically.
Is it dirty? Does it have bugs stuck to it? Is the leading edge erosion? So all those situations would would benefit if if this a present and pressure Fijis pressure surface beaches really very uncommon. So some of the really big breaks like 67.
Plus, me too great. We’re now starting to see a few voltage generators appear on the precious surface. And the reason for this is that because these air flows are getting so thick so far out on the blade to to carry all the necessary loads, the curvatures are getting really quite steep.
And whenever you have steep curvatures on a thick airfoil, you’re more prone to try to get separation installed. I think we were talking about earlier. So that’s why you might start to see some pressure surface. Fijis creeping in as the blades get longer and longer.
And so I want to stick with the idea that vortex generators can fix and fix is probably the wrong word, but they can sort of fix aerodynamically some imperfections with the leading edge. So, you know, we talked about the huge problems that they had in Texas this past year with icing.
So it sounds like, you know, vortex generators can really almost be like an insurance policy to like, hey, if the blade starts to get erosion or like you said, bugs or, you know, dust, dirt, debris, ice, whatever, these are going to sort of like smooth that out and maintain the kind of standard performance that they would expect
. Is that right?
Yeah, I think that’s a really nice way of thinking about it. So if you look at the output power of a turbine over the years, it’s all over the place, like it’s spiking up and down. You may see some kind of patterns in there seasonally, like it’s very, very variable.
And if you have to take a mathematical term, I felt like a standard deviation of that power. It could be quite large, whereas if you put on a vortex generator, typically you’re going to see that band, that spread of powers reduce.
So you get a narrower band of noise on your power. And the reason is because when you get these kind of suboptimal flow conditions, the icebergs erosion, they’re the things that are adding that variability into the power. So anything you can do to minimize the variability in aerodynamic behavior, the better.
So that’s where your VGS come in. So we were talking our boundaryless earlier. Well, all of those things we’ve just listed, they hurt the boundary layer. They say reduce the health of the boundary layer. That mean it’s less likely to progress nicely to the trailing edge and remain fully attached to any of those scenarios if it’s going
to help with. And it’s just going to reduce the variability because you’re not going in and out of stall, for example.
So the placement of VGS and even the size of the vortex generators really matters. In it, you’re dealing with very complicated airflow movements over a rotating blade. They are dynamics here is super critical to maximize your your energy performance.
So how do you determine where the edges are place and what size of eggs to use?
Yeah, and that’s absolutely critical, because if you if you put vortex generators in the wrong place or the wrong size, a mess, they’re not going to work so well. Right. They won’t be optimal in how much energy they’re adding the worst.
You know, they might do nothing at all. They might even make your performance a little bit worse. So it’s very important to understand the individual bladed design that you’re putting these vortex generators on. So a CFD analysis, a computational fluid dynamics analysis, that’s one of the key tools we have in our toolbox to understand how to optimize
a voltage generator layout. So, you know, as you say, these blades big and amazing. Quickly, there’s a lot of three dimensional flow. And these are hard things to to understand and to to design around. So if you take a model of your rotor and you put it through a CFD analysis, what it allows you to see is
the details, particularly that three dimensional flight attendants say, how big is the storm region? What position on the cold is it, et cetera, et cetera. By knowing these things, you can position your vortex generator array in a location that’s going to be most beneficial.
So that’s money. And that also links to the science as well. So as we go further out on the blade, every slice you take off the blade as you go further out has different aerodynamic characteristics, primarily driven by the fact that this is a rotating system.
So every time you go out by 10 centimeters, whatever, the initial velocity changes, because it’s a rotating system so that the inflow velocity changes and the angle of attack changes, standards changes, then your flow changes. So, yes, absolutely essential to look each part of the blade stage by stage.
Work out what the flight conditions are and get that like deep dove. And like understanding that then you can prescribe position size, length, the right to have the best effect.
So I feel like the word you just use prescribe is a good way to think of this, whereas this isn’t necessarily like an the counter, like, hey, just go down to Target or Wal-Mart or whatever and pick up a couple of boxes of orchardist generators and slap Morne because they’re not going to work the same as, you
know, like seeing someone again to do an analysis and say this is what size the configuration and you know, and where we should put these to get the best effect.
Exactly. You know, and it’s you know, you’re doing a disservice to your to your assets if you’re not doing you know, you’re spending millions of dollars on a really complex, well engineered piece of equipment. Why on earth would you just slap something on and hope you have to go through a rigorous engineering approach to understand how to
how to do this and not something that I personally spend a lot of time.
And, you know, is this something that you see as far as like the retrofits go that they’re doing it? Is it any sort of is it two years after the blades? You know, the turbines have been up and running.
Is it five years is a ten years? I mean, is there a certain time when this is recommended or should it just they should they be installed from the get go and earlier is always better?
I think, you know, the the blades vary so much like they vary in in the quality of their manufacture and they vary in weather positions. So the climatic conditions at the plates are facing, say, my rule of thumb would be that any new blade should have vortex generators from day one on the inboard pass the blade.
So it’s very straightforward to understand that the benefit of doing that, you can improve it quite nicely. But getting back to what we said earlier, you know, the Al Gore vortex generators, that’s kind of takes a little bit of a different mindset.
So you’ve got to have that understanding that I’m going to do something today because it makes sense and it’s cheap to do it once on the ground or in the factory, whatever that may be. It’s not going to do a lot for a couple of years.
But as soon as that blade starts to experience the real world, wear and tear, then they’re going to perform a benefit. And if you want to go and put something out on the blade as a retrofit, you then obviously got to consider that a downtime.
You’ve got to get some right technicians on the blade. So it’s all achieved. But, you know, we do it all the time. But but it’s just a little bit hard to do, a little bit more expensive. So I think if I was a customer, I’d be I’d be talking to the area.
Like if there’s no beaches on the plate now, why not? You know, they should have a really good argument as to why they’re not putting them on in in the factory, especially down in the region, say the outpoured.
That’s a little bit more of a nuanced conversation saying keep track of your blades, you know, use drone inspections, look at the blades every year. How will they degrading? How does the surface look? So even if you don’t have them on from the factory, if you have a good to an Emery team, you’ve got great imagery, particularly
from a dream kind of nice place that helps you to decide is now the time that I should really get these devices on if I don’t have them already?
So Nicolelis, the OEM’s, when they actually design a blade shape, they typically don’t use CFD analysis like a 3D analysis to determine aerodynamics. They’d use a blade element momentum model, which is a sort of a 2D approach to design the blade shape.
And when you’re talking about making two percent, four percent improvements in an AEP, you really need to get to a 3D model and really look at, particularly at the outer, a third of the blade very discreetly and get to a CFD.
So a lot of times I think there’s a just a disconnect from the operator standpoint, like why didn’t the OEMs put VGS on my blade? Well, is it is it part because they’re not really looking at that as as as part of the engineering analysis because they just don’t do CFD or what what drives that internally?
Yeah, I think it’s it’s a really interesting point. So, you know, the wind industry isn’t very old in the grand scheme of things, like as an engineering discipline. It’s relatively mature. If you if you compare it to say, to say aerospace.
So a lot of these really high fidelity tools, they don’t necessarily have the traction and the frequency of use that you might necessarily expect them, particularly five or six years ago, it was pretty expensive to do CFD simulations of a small blade.
You know, it’s it’s a big model. It needs a big computer to run on. But, you know, as you know, CPU cost that plummeted and you know, they keep plummeting. So these kind of analyzes are a much more possible now for us from a cost perspective.
So the blade momentum, it’s not going away. It’s like the bedrock of blade design and. The reason is it’s incredibly computationally efficient and it’s really good. It does great things, but if you’re trying to squeeze every last drop of salt out of the race, it’s just simply not good enough.
There’s too many assumptions in it and there’s too many limitations. So when you move to CFD, you can take out all of these assumptions, particularly about 2D flooding that have been driving a lot of play designs up until this point.
So so, yeah, if you haven’t done a CFD analysis of your plate, you’re going to be missing important flight characteristics. And yeah, it’s it’s difficult to say how much some new blades have or haven’t had. CFD, Denver. My batting is 90 percent of the blades on the world today of how to listen to no CFD work done
on them. I mean, you’ve got this optimization gap, you’ve got this potential, and that’s where, you know, power comes in. You know, we do a lot of work in this in this area, just taking that analysis to the next level and looking what may have been missed.
What is that? The optimization gap affected me.
So, Nicholas, power curve, when they are designing a vortex generator layout, they’re actually looking at the the operators blades themselves and doing a really fine CFD analysis of those particular blades. And once Powercor identifies where VGS are need to be placed to improve the AEP, what are the next steps?
That power curve is going to be doing to with the customer and their blades.
Sure. So, you know, I think what you’ve said is is really important about understanding the real blades, the real place that that customer owns and the conditions that they’re facing. So I will take everything the customer can give us, such as Skardu data inspection reports will go out on site and take measurements if required.
Just we have, you know, the full picture of what’s the health of those blades and what is the real geometry that’s sitting out there in the town. So that enables all the analysis and basically to come up with this with this customized kit for that particular blade model and sometimes on the on that particular site.
So once we’ve we’ve got that kit will then discuss with the operator. Now, what is what is the best time to install these products? Oh, there’s different climatic conditions and budgets constraints, right? Yes. So we’re plan a window where we can go on site and get these products installed.
And it’s you know, it’s a pretty straightforward process once you’ve done that, because it’s so remote access installation. So it’s not going to be involving lots of other equipment or personnel. And so it’s typically a two man team.
They’re on the ropes doing the work. So for something like, you know, a hundred meter rotor, pretty average rate you would find in the U.S. you’re looking at around two to three days, prorata, depending on the size of the upgrade pack to get all of that kit put on the blade and like, say, rope access only you
can turn the turbine on at the end of each day between between work. That’s not an issue. So that process is pretty straightforward. And then the interesting bit starts because then we’re collecting the data to prove what is the percentage increase in AP.
So we’ll be looking at the Skardu data from the very day those turbines at the ocurred installed. We’ll track it for as long as we need to to get the statistical uncertainty down to say what is the percentage increase, give the customer the information they need to drive that business case calculations to to carry on for further
rollouts.
So, Nick, as as we wrap up, I’m curious about the future. Obviously, all these processes and little pieces of technology, the way they’re manufactured, installed, they’ll change. So what do you see for the future of vortex generators? Is there any shape changes, design changes, installation changes?
I mean, what’s what’s coming up next?
Yeah, really exciting. And actually, Pål Covid involved in a couple of projects right now, R&D projects to look at this kind of future, Fijis or Advanced Fijis. It’s maybe the first thing we touch on is the shape of the vortex generator.
So we’re at the very start. I said, you know, if you’ve got something staight, convince the floats, it’s probably going to create a vortex of some form or other. And over the years, the industry’s kind of converged on these little triangle shapes.
You see them on aircraft, boats, cars, wind turbines, and then they’re pretty much look the same. And that’s because they’re fairly straightforward to analyze that. Quite nice to manufacture. So, you know, they’ve got some momentum. However, like anything, if we start to optimize, we’re trying to squeeze every last percentile of the turbine.
We’re going to need to look at the shape of those Fijis. So things that look a little bit more exotic, they’re a little bit more curved, have different form factor. I think you’re going to start to see vortex generators that aren’t fitting this traditional triangle shape, and I was actually testing swimming in the wind until a couple
of weeks ago. We think we can see maybe a 10 or 15 percent lift to drag ratio improvement over standard triangle. And that’s really exciting because that could translate into a, you know, a few tenths of a percent a peak.
So and it’s for free, you know, for you to put the pieces on. Why not put on the ones that give you even more performance? So. Yeah, I think a few shape changes. Definitely overdue in my opinion. I think the industry has been a little bit boring for want of a better word in terms of how they
can better money into some more exciting geometry. I think the second thing is probably installation wise. You know, we’re seeing more and more. And you had some great guests on your show about robotic processes, whether it be measurement or repair, helping technicians on the plane.
There’s all kind of devices starting to mature. So I get really excited about, you know, maybe pairing up a very access team with a robot or a dream that can actually make the process quicker, safer, more efficient. So maybe get your Troyan marking up the blade, whether bijoux, carry the right text, follow it down, maybe a little
bit further down the line. You can imagine a slightly different VGI design thing, a bit more compatible for trying to actually go up and stick on the blade or one of these ones, you know, crawling robots that could roll out and put some pages on the blade, say particularly the offshore markets.
There’s a real focus to get people away from the turbines. No one wants to be hanging from a rope 300 foot above the North Sea. So I think this is going to have some attention. And like as I would in activities offshore, you kind of start seeing add ons becoming kind of part of the portfolio for robotics
and other autonomous devices going out there and helping with these processes.
Well, I like the idea of the alternate shapes. Maybe you can even do seasonal seasonal shapes like, you know, it’s Halloween coming up. You get like a spooky ghost on one blade, you know?
Yeah. I mean, that’s that’s pumpkin spice latte vortex generators. Yes. Well, why not? I mean, actually, you make quite an interesting point because perhaps some specific climatic conditions, some specific light shape. Maybe it calls for a slightly different Viju geometry.
Again, you know, the fact there hasn’t been this mass investment in CFD, wind tunnel testing, all these things regarding our ons means there’s all kinds of optimization process available. You know, there’s there’s no reason why they should all look the same, that there will be optimization potential.
It’s just what’s that cost benefit analysis. And I’m hoping that, you know, in the coming months that I’ll be able to maybe come back on the show and show you some of the cool shapes we’ve been working on the panel.
Well, and we’ve also talked in the past about, you know, as costs and manufacturing gets easier and it comes down that it might be more advantageous to potentially install, you know, like a power curve upgrade that only lasts maybe five years instead of 10 years or only a couple of years, because you say, hey, let’s just do
it. These are more inexpensive, easier to install because of robotics or whatever. So now we can revisit this and see how the blades changed in a couple of years and maybe install new, better optimized ones down the road rather than trying to install like forever vortex generators today.
You know, do this saying, hey, you know, this is inexpensive now where we can just continue to reassess every couple of years. Do you think that’s something that might make sense for this or maybe more for other types of upgrades?
I mean, maybe I mean, 20 years, 25 years that the lifetime of a turbine, that’s a long time for and it’s a long time for engineering. And there’s no way the design you put on today is going to be the best design in 20 years time.
It’s just not at the moment. I think the fact that you have a highly skilled labor ready access crew going out and putting these on. That’s quite a big proportion of the retrofit cost. So at the moment, my gut feeling is that the economics probably doesn’t make sense to to have something upgraded or changed, you know, in
the five to 10 year scope. I think if you’re able to bring a bit more robotics and maybe then maybe that will help to push down those install costs of it and maybe allow a refresh or an upgrade in 10, 15 years time to take advantage of the latest technology.
I mean, you know, you don’t tend to see many other things look exactly the same for 20 years, planes, cars, trains, whatever. They tend to have things done to them. A winglets, new VGS. All kinds of stuff, so.
Yeah, the big thing for wind turbines there is, is the cost side, depending on cost of energy, cost of install as to whether you hit that sweet spot. And I think today we’re not there. But things are changing very fast.
So I think in five years, maybe, maybe that can be a little bit different.
And then before you go, there’s a couple of others that we just want to quickly touch on. And we’re thinking of having you back on to talk about these more in depth in the future. But, you know, there’s Gurnee flaps and trailing edge serrations are to the other big ones.
Can you just give us a quick rundown of both of those? Because they don’t get quite as much press, I think, as as for generators do.
No, no. I think these are definitely the most common add-on out there, say our gurney flap. You typically see those down in the region of a turbine. So like the in a third of the span, something like that.
So those of your listeners that way, inclined gurney flaps are often named after a person. So he was an Indy car driver, team manager back in back in the 70s. So, yeah, the gurney is named after a motorsport device.
And the idea of a gurney flap is that you put it on to a blade or indico wing, whatever, and it gives you more lift. So very little Drac penalty. So down in the region of the blade, we talked about this hynie 3-D flow, the stall flying, thick airfoils, gurney flaps are very useful down that because they’re
giving you more lift where you really kind of crying out for more lift. So they’re very useful down there to give you a bit of a lift boost that translates into more torque, morality, training explorations. They are primarily a noise reduction feature.
So I think you probably see fewer of them in the US than in Europe because of just regulatory differences. But they’re the kind of little sawtooth devices that you might have seen on the trailing edge of a blade.
And what they’re doing is they’re changing the scattering mechanism primarily of how the noise is emitted from a blade. So the main noise component from a from a blade is aerodynamic noise. So that kind of swishing noise. Yeah.
So serrations helping to to reduce that by changing the scattering mechanism, trailing edge and also changing some of the Bandelier and the mixing properties. But fundamentally, they’re a really nice device to a proven device to take, you know, at least two decibels.
That noise off your of your Raichel, which can be incredibly powerful. You know, if you’re running a turbine, slightly lower r.p.m., seven times a day to coat noise due to regulation or something. Well, maceration may help you get out of that noise mode.
So you get an IP based at the same time, kind of indirectly.
Got it. That was great, Nick. Thanks so much for coming on the show. How can people follow up with you and with Powercor?
Yeah, thanks. Thanks a lot for having me back on again. You can find the power curve on on our website, polka dot DKA. You’re also welcome to to reach out directly so you can find me. You can find my colleagues on unlinked.
And if you search Palka or Minin got a few clips out there on YouTube, if you want to learn a little bit more about some of these devices. So, yeah, three different ways. Very happy to hear from from our owners operators omes.
Yeah. We can dove into how we can best optimize so
that our minds. Yeah. So definitely check out the description of this podcast wherever you’re listening, and you’ll find links directly to Nicholas and Powercor of and all their resources. So yeah. Thanks again for coming on the show. Appreciate it.
Very welcome. Thanks a lot.
All right, so we want to thank again our guests here, Nick Gaudern from Power Curve, so be sure to follow up with him in the description or show notes of this podcast wherever you’re listening or watching. Welcome to reach out to them.
And again, he does a great job. We’re appreciative of his time. So moving on, let’s go to Germany. So we’ve had a in the news, a Nordics and 149 4500 series wind turbine collapse at a farm in Germany.
And this has been reported in the news of a bunch of ballots, have taken the story, but there’s not a lot of information on it. Rosemary, does that strike you as odd that there’s really not much out there as a just really early in the in the investigation about it, or is it really just that maybe there’s
they’re not really interested in pushing out too much info?
Yeah, I mean, it’s it’s odd to me that a very new wind turbine has collapsed. And in Germany and from a major manufacturer, that’s odd. The fact that we don’t know too much about why yet, that’s not odd to me at all.
I mean, I’m sure that they are trying very hard to keep this as as secret as possible. I, I don’t I’ve got no clue whether they know by now I have suspicions about the reason. But yeah, no, it doesn’t surprise me that they’re not letting us know what their suspicions are.
Well, I have a question. We’ll kick it back to you, Rosemary. Why don’t they have some sort of monitoring system, just like a webcam that just sort of like I in the sky kind of keeps an eye on everything in their wind farm?
Why is that not a kind of a standard thing, just like even like only a nest camera? People have a ring camera outside
of their home. You mean like security in case it was from vandals or sabotage or something? Oh, well,
not not necessarily for any specific reason, but just in general, like they can just get. Hey, let’s go back to the tape. What happened to the bird actually strike at this timer? Did a lightning strike at this time like why aren’t all these wind farms or maybe they are.
Why are they all monitored? Like, why don’t they have a tape, I guess, of this?
Yeah, I guess the reason that it’s kind of like a a good handy law of renewable energy is that when you ask a question, the answer is money. So you may be just like a global global law. I mean, yeah, the answer would be money for sure that they don’t want to install all these cameras everywhere.
And second, probably nearly as significant. And she would be monitoring the the the data that you get. Although I guess you could just have it writing, rewriting over itself until something happened and then come and look. I did actually hear about one time there was some debate about what had caused a wind turbine to oh, it was
just a blade that that broke. And it happened that somebody was fishing nearby and saw saw on their dash cam a lightning strike. So that was very handy in that case. And I guess if you were monitoring every single turbine, then you could always be sure to.
Yeah. To to catch it.
Alan Watts, what’s your take on the situation? I know obviously in the aviation world. They you know, when a pilot goes down, there’s obviously a big investigation and it seems like they make a lot of that information public.
Why do you think it’s so different in the wind industry?
I think because it’s a lack of regulatory body to force it on on airplanes. There’s a lot of instrumentation in monitoring. And they have the black box, which is recording all that data all the time. And in fact, there has been times in discussions about putting cameras in the cockpit, and that’s been contentious.
I don’t think that’s been done in all cases. I think we’re still talking about it. But I think the technology is there to definitely get video for most situations at this point, because we have so many cameras. We’ll have one in our pocket most of the time.
So I think you raise a really good point, Dan, is that in some places like I know in Japan, they’ve monitored individual wind turbines on some sites for quite a while, mostly for lightning strike reasons like they’ve instrumented them.
They have video cameras watching them. That’s that’s expensive to do, obviously. But in today’s world, I think you could. Weirdly enough, I think you’re right, Dan. I think I think you could definitely monitor a wind turbine with a with a little camera and just let it run.
And if anything weird happened, at least. You have something to go back on. Yeah, right, yeah. You wouldn’t have to keep all that much. And I think the benefit to the industry can be huge. And Rosemary says most of the major catastrophic Winterman events are appear to be structural.
Wouldn’t it be advantageous to have some data that we could be least sanitized and say, hey, this is what happened?
Yeah, I mean, I always want more data, but I also know that I had this, you know, every project that I ever worked on. I started out wanting, you know, like 10000 different sensors and monitoring stuff and gradually came back down to the reality of what the you know, the commissioning per installation and commissioning and operational crews
could actually deal with. So, yeah, it’s very easy for me to sit here in my in my office and say put cameras on every wind turbine. That would be awesome. But on the other hand, I know that I would never win that argument if I if I wanted a camera on a wind farm I was working on
that. They would convince me out of it pretty quickly. So, yeah, I think there’s that contrast.
Yeah, it seems like the the regulatory body piece is the big one, where until Soan forces them to have some sort of way to investigate and then share that info with everyone in the community, then they’re not going to volunteer into that.
But I mean, no one was was hurt. Right. So it’s not like in aviation industry where you going to demand to know why it happened when people are injured or killed. So unless it gets that bad with wind turbines where people are being injured, I’m not sure that we’ll say it.
Yeah, but one of the things we ought to consider here is sort of two pieces. The insurance assurance agency drives a lot of that. Insurance actually drives the monitoring part of that on aircraft on some level. And I think when turbines will be the same.
But I think there’s already a platform to put a camera on, which is the pink system, which is monitoring the noise of wind terminals right now. If it had a little data recorder and a little simple camera that was pointed up to the sky.
And it just sat there and recorded the last 24 hours like Dan’s talking about. That would be really interesting because I think a lot of information can be gleaned out of that. That would be cool.
Or just I mean, considering how far like when you see these photos from like a drone. I mean, if you just put a camera on like strategically like five out of your, you know, 50 wind turbines on a farm on the top of the nozzle facing rearward or whatever, you could probably get a pretty good even if
it’s not up close, you could probably have a a bird’s eye view of your whole farm with just a couple of strategically placed ones. So maybe GoPro will sponsor, you know, the next to the next wind farm around here.
Who knows? Or we just strap some on all the migratory birds. No, you. You can’t say kill two birds with one stone. Oh, all right. I’ll just stop that. Anyway, last article that of today, Reppas, a U.S. representative, Frank Marsh Marvan from Indiana, is advocating for the federal government to step up and provide some funding for training
for wind and solar jobs, because obviously with the offshore wind boon, you know, from the Biden administration, these very fast growing industries where people are worried that the jobs market might not be able to keep up the nation’s need to step up and maybe get away from just all the privatized educational endeavors, but also sort of like
give some government programs to get people trained and to work in renewables.
I don’t think so. And here’s the reason why. I think the in the United States, we have a community college system which is like a two year training program system, and those community colleges are all over the place.
And I think Dan and I were talking about this just earlier this week as as in the United States, it’s really hard to know where the training is. There are a lot of places to get wind turbine specific training, particularly in the Midwest, where a lot of wind turbines are right now.
But you just can’t really find them. And people contact my company all the time and say, hey, I would like to send in my resume. I’m just looking to be a one term a technician. Where do I go?
And there really isn’t a lot of information about it. But I do think there’s a there already is an infrastructure in the United States to do that. And through high school programs and apprentice programs and community colleges. And there are I think there’s actually some colleges that have studies in renewable energy and wind turbines.
That infrastructure is already there. I don’t know if we need to add something on top of it. A lot of wind turbines are very specific, like a Seimas wind turbine. It’s not exactly like a versus wind turbine. And I think the OEMs have done a decent job.
I know we have talked to Siemens long ago that they have a training center in Orlando, Florida, where they train people that the the winter manufacturers are doing a pretty good job of training technicians on their specific turbine.
That, I think, is fantastic. We should encourage that to happen because that’s where you get the I think you get the best training is right from an OEM.
I mean, that makes sense, you know, for those who are unemployed, for there to be a system like shuttle them in towards renewable energy trades. I think that makes a lot of sense. That would be cool if that could happen to us.
And of course, Alan’s right. The community college system is a much more affordable way to get a lot of that done. But yeah, maybe there could be room for improvement there as well. So that’s going to do it here today for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Thanks so much for listening. Thanks again to our guest. Nick Gaudern from Power Curve can be sure to follow up with him in the show notes below wherever you listen on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher. Thanks for being here. And we’ll see you here next week on uptime.
Operating a profitable wind farm is all about mitigating costs, minimizing risks and being efficient with maintenance, repairs and upgrades. It’s incredibly expensive to send a team of rope access technicians up tower to make even simple repairs. We also know how costly lightning damage can be requiring inspection, repairs and downtime for even minor lightning strikes.
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