LM Wind Power Blade Improvement Patents

We discuss some of LM Wind Power’s blade ideas, including a fiberglass fabric dispenser, flattened blade tips to reduce noise, and a blade window for their two-piece blades.

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This is Power Up, where groundbreaking wind energy ideas become your clean energy future. Here’s your hosts, Allen Hall and Phil Totaro.

Allen Hall: Alright, Phil, some really interesting patents this week from our friends at LM. The first one is something you can relate to. You know, they say that necessity is the mother of invention, and that really the second saying about patents and ideas is probably one of the better places to come up with them is in the restroom.

Well, this Definitely happened because this patent involves putting Rolls of fiberglass fabric in a dispenser mechanism, just like an industrial toilet paper dispenser. That’s what this is. So instead of having to carry those heavy rolls of fiberglass and put them onto the blade and basically lumbering them around, what they have is a basically a carriage system that holds multiple rolls and you pull from the roll.

And once the roll is empty, it rolls back into a basic containment device to hold the tubes that are left and a new roll. So all this is a really great device and it is pretty simple and I’m sure it saves the people on the floor a tremendous amount of time and energy. Come on, Phil, this one came out of the restroom, right?

I

Phil Totaro: can’t speak to that, but what I can say is that the amount of manufacturing automation that we use in wind turbine blades is not what it needs to be. So this is a really good step in the right direction. In addition to being innovative and, and creative this is as you said, I mean, it’s a huge time saver not to have to hand roll anything, and it, it allows for better layup when you’re, you know, putting, putting different fabric layers down.

So, you know, keep in mind that for the majority of the industry, and this includes all the blades that we still manufacture over in China, of course, The majority of the industry is actually still using a lot of hand layup process and not a whole lot of process automation. So for LM to have recently developed this type of concept and this type of technology, it’s a great application and certainly a necessary one.

I’m not quite sure if they developed it in the toilet, but You know, hopefully it’s not in the waste bin either.

Allen Hall: Our second idea is from, of course, LM Wind Power, since this is their week. And this patent describes a innovative turbine blade design that significantly Reduces noise, but maintaining aerodynamic performance.

Now, the way this blade is designed, and it’s mostly a shape, is the pressure side is broken into three distinct sections. A convex curve near the leading edge, a concave section in the middle, and a straight curve. section near the trailing edge. So it kind of goes flat. So if you’ve seen some more recent blades, they’re kind of cupped, right?

And in that cupping, you create this little skipping action of the air at the back end, and it makes this rapidly changing noise that you hear on the ground. So what LM is doing is sort of flattening out the blades at the airflow coming off. Is it nearly as loud? And there’s a couple of little tweaks they’ve done here, but.

I have not seen this implemented, but it’s a really good idea. And I wonder if it is derived from some of the computational work that LM does.

Phil Totaro: Yeah, and actually what’s interesting about this is that they’ve actually taken something that would have otherwise been incorporated into, you know, noise mitigation devices like serrated trailing edge that you put on the rear obviously the trailing edge of the blade and they’re actually trying to incorporate And some of that into the blade design.

Now, not necessarily the trailing edge serrations but if you think about it, when you take a conventional blade and you put the trailing edge attachment on, it’s actually extending out the length of the cord length of the blade. And, and making it’s usually, you know angled surface on top and a flat surface on the bottom.

So what LM is doing with this is effectively just lengthening the, the cord length of the blade a little bit and incorporating that flat bottom plate into the trailing edge into the blade design itself so that you don’t necessarily have to rely on so many add ons, which Add complexity, add cost, give you opportunities for, you know, having, you know, transportation related repairs and even on site repairs and things like that.

It’s just more stuff to have to fix. So if you’ve got a low noise blade designed with the that type of technology integrated into it with this, you know, this cord length innovation, then I think this is a great idea.

Allen Hall: Our third patent is a window device. Now, how many times have you thought to yourself, if I could only reach inside of this blade or cut through it?

Get my head in there where I get some eyeballs on a problem. I could probably solve this, but I can’t because there’s no access to do it. Well, LM has fixed that problem. They’ve created these little windows. Now, remember that LM also designs these two piece blades, so there’s a big mechanical joint that happens there and an electrical joint for that matter.

And so it’d be nice to be able to look in there and see how things are going. Well, They created this inward mounted panel that uses the blade’s internal pressure to keep the little window sealed rather than fighting against it and trying to, you know, mechanically hold it down. It uses the pressure differential to help keep it in place and They have a couple of interesting things just like velcro and some elastic bands that kind of hold this thing together So it’s relatively simple.

So if it broke you could replace it or fix it in the field This is cool. Now. I have not seen this one Phil and I would with the two piece blades We just came across a two piece blade a couple of months ago out in the streets of Oklahoma and didn’t see a window So I’ve been shocked to see it, but this is still a good idea And I’m really shocked that LM hasn’t implemented it on blades, particularly like at Sun Zia, where there’s a lot of these two piece blades going in, where you’d probably want to look inside of a blade without having to, you know, put a little rover at the, at the hub end and push it up in.

Doesn’t this make sense?

Phil Totaro: This one is, is a bit more dubious for me only because I understand where they’re going with the innovation and wanting to have, you know interior access to towards the, the, you know, narrow tip part of the, the, the blade where you obviously typically can’t can’t get anybody in there, including potentially a, a crawler that would go, you know, inside the length of the blade in the first place.

So. You know, that said, it creates that scenario where, okay, you’re, you’re making, potentially making repairs more accessible and all that. And that’s great. The problem is, is that anytime you cut a window into something, you’re weakening the structure necessarily, and you’re having to put a lot of reinforcement in there.

Now, as you mentioned, that if you’re going to use this, a two piece blade is probably where it makes the most sense to use it. Because you’re already having a joint where you’re putting anything together. You know, we want a structure that is strong and continuous because that, that is lowest cost of manufacture, lowest cost of maintenance and least likelihood of any kind of physical damage.

Anytime you put a joint into anything, you’re introducing another failure mode and another You know, area of potential weakness. So I like where they’re going with it conceptually in terms of being able to repair, but anytime you can avoid putting a joint in anything or putting a window into anything, probably the better.