Power-Up: Blade Lift Cushion, Yaw Break Sleeve

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

This week, Siemens Gamesa's idea which protects delicate items on the blade while doing lifts, Integrated Power Services' replaceable yaw break sleeve, and a new way to keep ants away from your picnic. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Allen Hall: Welcome to Power Up, the Uptime podcast focused on the new hot off the press technology that can change the world. Follow along with me, Allen Hall, and IntelStor's Phil Totaro, as we discuss the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will charge your energy future. All right, guys, our first patent this week is something kind of unique from Siemens Gamesa. And it tries to answer a problem that all winter blade lifting Apparatus have, especially when there are vortex generators or gurney flaps or trailing edge serrations, which is during the lift, those items tend to get plucked off and it makes the operator not happy. It makes everybody not happy because somebody's got to get up there and replace them, generally speaking. So Siemens, Gamesa has come up with a little bit of a handling tool to avoid this damage, which is kind of like a pillow like device some sort of plastic, multiple plastic. That encapsulates these add ons so they don't get broken during the lift. Now, Phil, this seems like a, actually a decent moneymaker because other operators, wind turbine OEMs have the same problem. If you look on the ground after a lift. Usually, you can see those little pieces, those injection molded pieces laying on the ground there. Philip Totaro: Shards of things stripped off. Yeah, so this one's really interesting, and I should admit that I'm not actually sure if Siemens Gamesa is using this with any of the EPC contractors yet. However the reason that it's been developed, as you mentioned, Alan, is that it's, it's there to try and help prevent add ons from being kind of sheared off as, if the blade is being lifted in the saddle and there's either some kind of, gust or something, some kind of torsion that, that occurs that might shift the blade in the saddle in particular. That can cause a lot of these incidents where, where bits get sheared off. Where this comes in handy is it's basically padding on the straps that is made with some kind of, gelatinous something. They don't, I mean, they, they go into a bit of detail on what these materials could be in the patent. So you can, I guess, use your imagination, but it's, it's basically Relatively compliant. Jelly like structure. I guess that's the best non technical way to explain it. You know that it'll basically accommodate the deformation when it goes up against the blade surface that has the vortex generators or whatever poking out of it. So you could use this for, for riblets, you could use this for, for any little add ons you want. So I, I think from that perspective it's, it's pretty clever. We at Intel Store will dig more into whether or not this is being used commercially and, make that a part of our our technical analysis on inventions like this. Joel Saxum: I think this one makes absolute sense out in the field, right? It's not too complicated. It's something that can be implemented pretty easily. Thank you. And in my mind, I'm already thinking like, Oh, this might actually give the lifting company lifting the crane or however you're lifting a blade a little bit of a better grip on on the blade itself as well So sometimes there is slippage in that and t...