Power-Up: Fillable Blades, Up-Tower Gearbox Repair

This week on Uptime Power-Up, an idea from Takkion for re-boring the gearbox and adding an insert without needing cranes and a method from Alliance for Sustainable Energy for a fillable wind turbine blade. Plus a way to rest your head while standing up.

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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 idasaur’s Phil Totaro, as we discuss the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will charge your energy future. Alright guys, this week some really interesting ideas on the docket.

This first one has to do with replacing parts of a gearbox. If you’ve been around gearboxes long enough, you realize that there’s a nice set of bearings in them and sometimes the bearings get overloaded. And they start to spin inside the housing. When that happens, it creates some unevenness and you essentially have to pull the gearbox out of the turbine, sit on the ground and work on it or replace it.

But this idea from Renew Energy Maintenance, which is a part of Takkion now, I believe, has a way of basically taking some, some machinery, some equipment up tower and re boring. This gearbox, we’re putting an insert in or a sleeve in so that the bearing can be set properly so that the gearbox then functions correctly.

Now Phil, this is a big money saver, right? To have a piece of equipment that saves you from bringing in a crane?

Philip Totaro: Well, it, and it’s not only that, it’s the fact that, on site maintenance is something that’s always subject to a certain level of precision. But when you start talking about doing gearbox repairs and replacements, and this is, as you’re mentioning, if you basically have a situation where the bearing raceway kind of machined itself out, you’re probably gonna have to fit something new in there.

But in order to do that, you’ve got to kind of refresh the bore. And so what this idea is, is effectively a tool that allows you to rebore this hole and stick a sleeve in there, then put the bearing, the new bearing raceway in there so that everything still kind of fits in a, in a compliant way.

On the original gearbox housing. But it’s doing so, like you mentioned, in a way that it doesn’t require a huge crane for lifting the gearbox out and lowering it to the ground, where you would normally want to do repairs. Of this level of precision when, when we talk about doing up tower repairs on like a blade, you might be able to, to get away with, shaving things down up there and while guys are dangling off and ladies are dangling off ropes and, and whatnot.

These, these technicians. The, the reality of that is there’s a, there’s a certain level of precision involved with that, and you can probably get away with, minor idiosyncrasies or minor variations in, in the quality of that type of work. When you’re talking about boring a new hole in the gearbox housing, it has to be done with a certain level of precision in order for everything to still, fit properly, like the bearing raceways, the sleeve that they’re talking about in this patent application.

Everything’s gotta be able to fit in a certain tolerance level. So, the fact that they’ve invented this tool that’s gonna allow for, this repair that would normally involve a large crane pick, or, even if it’s a turbine level crane pick. You’re starting to talk about, extra tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands with a big crane to be able to pick the gearbox out, well, pick the nacelle off, cover off, pick the, the, the gearbox out of the nacelle lower it down to the ground, repair it, then put it all back.

This is something that you can basically, pull a few things apart up tower and, and do this machining in situ which is a, a pretty attractive capability to, to have, or any, any kind of repair, so, kudos to Renew Energy Management.

Joel Saxum: What this looks like to me is the fact that even if you’re a little bit off in your machining and you got to redo this every two or three years, you’re still going to be money ahead than you were coming out with a crane if you have to redo this process here and there.

Now, when you get into anything, just like Phil said, the precision of. machining out anything for a bearing or any kind of rotating assembly. I used to do so I’ve done not used to do, but I’ve done some high performance engines in my past. And if you get something just a little bit wrong, like you’re it’s toast, right?

So the fact that they’ve figured out a way to do this, Fantastic. I think this could be a good, really big boost to the industry. I don’t know personally if Renew is doing a Renew Energy Maintenance is doing this out in the field or not, or if someone else has licensed it from them or not. I do not know.

But I hope they are.

Allen Hall: Well, our friends at Alliance for Sustainable Energy have a patent out that talks about basically a fillable. So the concept is you build sort of a superstructure of sense and within you cover it with fabric and inner and an outer fabric cover. And haul this lightweight, inexpensive piece all the way out to site.

And when you get to site, you can assemble it. But then at the end, you fill the two fabric layers between the two fabric layers with foam to then create a wind turbine blade shape. And there’s been a number of ideas like this, like GE had something similar to this, where Had a fabric covered sort of superstructure to lighten the blade up and to make it shippable.

There’s been a couple of attempts at this. This one is a little more unique, though, Phil, in the sense that they’re using a filler or foam to create the final shape.

Philip Totaro: The, the Alliance for Sustainable Energy part of what they do is they serve as the holding company for the intellectual property assets of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the United States.

And so this technology is something that not only was developed with government funding but is theoretically, able to be licensed or sold to to anybody in the industry that, that would want to try to, to build and implement this, or at least partner with NREL to kind of further this this area of research.

So, while this is a clever idea, and I use this term quite a lot, I think this is clever, that’s clever. It is indeed a clever idea in that, the engineers came up with a unique solution to something that is a challenge in terms of transportation and logistics. Do I really like this though from the standpoint of it could be used in industry?

Probably not because this is a little too, there’s too many kind of unknowns as well as differences from conventional technology that, you don’t win prizes for, for, clever ideas really at the end of the day. Supply chain companies that build and sell components for wind turbines, they do so on the premise that It’s part of a system that can be, looked at as financeable by both the development community and the financial community and the insurance community for that matter.

This doesn’t necessarily fall into that category of, it’s, it’s unfortunately a bit too radical or it’s too much of a departure from conventional technology, I think, to be really widely used in industry. Is there some type of application that this could have in the future, potentially? Even potentially from the standpoint of repairs, because you could, you could see designs being tweaked in the future to allow for, a cavity where you could have some kind of, foam core that could be pumped in and, and could solidify into.

A cavity that could provide some kind of structural support or something like that, that, if you detected there might be an area of cracking or damage around the tip, maybe you could have something where you could, pump in some kind of foam core or foam supportive material So there could be aspects of this that could eventually be used in the industry.

Do I see this replacing conventional blades in 10 to 15 years? I do not.

Joel Saxum: In my mind, I could see this working for like, an off grid application with a seven meter blade or something of that sort. But when you get to utility scale size, there’s just not enough consistency to be had with it. And if it fails, that failure is just too damn expensive.

To rely on a technology like this. That’s my opinion.

Allen Hall: Well, they say necessity is the mother of invention. And this is the case with this particular patent and our fun patent of the week. It’s an apparatus that sticks to the bathroom wall above a toilet, urinal, or some sort of shower head if you’re in the shower.

And it allows the user to lean their forehead against it while using the facilities. This is obviously you can imagine this in pretty much every bar and casino in America. Phil, I think this has inherent problems. Now, if you’re leaning forward and putting weight on your forehead while maybe inebriated, let’s just say it seems like you could stumble and fall and really hurt yourself while you’re trying to use this device.

Philip Totaro: That is, that is a possibility, but I, I actually think this is something, I, I can’t imagine if, if the, whoever invented this hasn’t sold, like, millions of these, I don’t know why, because this sounds, as you just mentioned, like it would go into every, public space imaginable, and, and there would be people using it, I mean, I don’t necessarily You don’t think I’d be at a urinal long enough to rest my head, but I could imagine, I mean, even just as a safety precaution, like, you could have something there if somebody’s like, they, they’re a little inebriated, they, they might need, like, head protection against the wall.

I mean, I, I like this one. I, I think this I think

this has merit. I

Joel Saxum: want to see it that can stick to the back of an airplane seat in an airplane. Because I sometimes try to rest my forehead on the seat in front of me and sleep on an airplane and this would be fantastic. See, all kinds of use cases for this stuff.