Power-Up: Mitsubishi Lightning Protection, NextEra Cable Saver

This week, Allen and Phil discuss NextEra’s Inventus Holdings patent to increase the longevity of cable bundles on wind turbines. And Mitsubishi Heavy Industry’s system for measuring lightning current on a wind turbine blade. Plus a groundbreaking method for swinging on a swing…

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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. It’s been a beautiful day. Busy week in new ideas, Phil, and our lead off for this week is a cable bundle longevity on wind turbines invention from Inventus Holdings.

And Inventus Holdings is actually who, Phil?

Philip Totaro: It’s NextEra Energy’s holding company for all their IP filings. So, what’s interesting about this is not just the invention they came up with, but the fact that asset owners and operators in the past Let’s say five to seven years have started filing patents on a lot of different technologies, including something like this, where, they wanted something that would provide them better vibration isolation for the, the cables that are running up and down the tower on a wind turbine.

And that’s basically what it is. It’s a, it’s a cable harness. It’s not particularly the sexiest sounding invention but it’s the design was something developed by NextEra because of their field experience. They saw that there were a lot of cable bundles that were having abrasion related reliability issues, and they, they developed this as a means to provide some kind of vibration isolation and, and abrasion isolation for the, the cable bundles to preclude them having to go out there and, and service these things more frequently as they were having to do in the past.

So, kudos to to NextEra on developing something that’s going to. Save them time and money doing field repairs. So the, the concept,

Allen Hall: it’s a little hard to visualize, but if you’ve ever used a lathe, if you have, you’re turning big objects in a lathe, you need a way to support it on one end it and let it rotate the same time.

So it looks like a lay support it’s basically what it is where the harnesses can move around internally to without friction to cause damage because a lot of operators have cable damage right there at the yaw deck because the cables rub against one another and against, and against the deck, which is crazy because the resulting failure modes are ugly and timely take a bunch of time to repair and, So good on Aventus and good on NextEra for coming up with this idea.

So our next idea is a lightning protection system for turban blades from MHI, Mitsubishi Heavy Industry. And this one’s a little unique. It’s sort of in my ballpark here in the lightning world. Where they’re trying to measure lightning current, where it attaches to the blade, and they’re envisioning, the Mitsubishi engineers are envisioning, putting a metal leading edge on a portion of the blade near the tip, obviously, and then having a metal tip, and to measure the current on each one of those, to see where lightning is striking on the blade.

It seems rather simple at first, Phil, but I think the implementation of this can be difficult.

Philip Totaro: Yeah, and it’s, it’s funny because, I mean, the question I have to you maybe is, is this really something that the industry needs? And how, how accurate could something like this even get? Oh, I think it can be very

Allen Hall: accurate.

The question is, do they need it? We’re working with a lot of operators around the world. At the moment, where lightning attaches on the blade is important, but if it attaches anywhere within the last couple of meters on the blade, not a big worry, as the structural engineers will tell you, once you get about 10 meters down and you start taking lightning punctures, the structural damage becomes more significant, of course, this patent doesn’t address it, but this patent is trying to get at, I think one of the key lightning issues at the moment is, Where is lightning attaching to the blade and what kind of lightning is attaching to a particular part of the blade?

Very important information. It’s a, it’s a good idea and it must be based on some of the service history that Mitsubishi has run into with their wind turbines. Yeah. Good concept. All right, Phil, the last idea on the docket is a method of swinging on a swing.

Philip Totaro: Sometimes during the course of the, the cataloging of all these patents, which, which we do at Intel store for technology intelligence and intellectual property risk mitigation.

We come across things that are just so kooky that we have to talk about them. And this is a patent that was filed in the year 2000 for a method for swinging on a swing. And literally, we’re showing the picture now on screen, but if you, if you read through this thing, it’s literally not any more complicated than just either back and forth or side to side, or maybe combinations thereof.

And that’s literally what these people have tried to patent with, with this, and I’m, I’m befuddled, as I usually am with these, with these wacky patents that we do, but I am just befuddled.

Allen Hall: Well, the inventor called it Tarzan swinging, so you, normally you go sort of front to back on a swing. What this one was is going to side to side, which I’m sure the person in the hot seat here It would make you tremendously nauseous.

Swinging by itself isn’t bad, but if you add in a side element to that, I see a lot of upset stomachs in this scenario. But, the one piece about this patent is the patent office came back and revised it. And canceled all the claims.

Philip Totaro: Originally, right.

Allen Hall: Right, so even though the patent examiner had blessed it and let it go through, evidently there was opposition to it, probably from people like you, Phil, that go through these patents and said, this is ridiculous.

This can’t stand. And so the patent office essentially rescinded it. So good on the patent office. We like to see it more happen more often, I think.

Philip Totaro: But I’ll tell you what, Alan, my absolute favorite part about this whole thing, besides everything we just covered, is that it’s literally stated in this patent application, actual jungle forestry is not required.