Uptime Power-Up: Wind Energy Innovations

Welcome to Uptime Power-Up, our new show focused on the latest and greatest wind innovations that push the industry forward! This week, Allen and Phil explore FabricAir’s system installation tool, Itrec’s offshore wind blade lifting method, Beridi Maritime’s floating wind structure, and a new way to enjoy your favorite summer treat. To learn about these technologies or inquire about more new tech, contact IntelStor at https://www.intelstor.com/.

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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, Alan Hall, and Itasaur’s Phil Totaro, as we discuss the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will charge your energy future.

All right, Fabric Air Canada. Phil, our friends up in Canada have been working on some tools for their game. The icing systems.

Philip Totaro: Yes. And what’s really interesting and novel about this is they developed a system that allows them to punch holes into some of the bulkheads and ribs along the length of the blade so that they can actually install this.

If you’re not familiar with fabric air, they have this kind of fabric tube that runs the length of the blade and circulates hot air to be able to de ice the blade. But in order to install it and retrofit it on older blades, you have to have a way that you can drill, drill a hole through some of the bulkheads and the ribs in the blade.

And so their, their latest patent that came up in our technology trend watch and research this week indicates that they’ve, developed a new system that could even be remote operated by a little rover drone that they could send down the length of the blade and have this thing drill out the, the bulkheads.

Allen Hall: And that tool can be used for other things besides this de icing system, right? If you’re putting holes in blades Allows access for a lot of other things to go up in a blade, right?

Philip Totaro: Including repairs on a lightning conduction system for example, or just running any other things that you might need to down the length of the blade.

You may need to install some arrow updates that would require some, some work in turn on the internal shell or the inside of the shell of the blade and so this would also facilitate facilitate that, so it’s it’s pretty clever.

Allen Hall: The technology they describe in their patent is focused on Senveon blades, but this could be used on almost any wind turbine blade.

Philip Totaro: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. The, the reason that they did that with Senveon is because they actually are working with up in Quebec, which if you’re not familiar, the independent research organization that actually has to send beyond turbines at their facility where fabric air through this partnership with with actually tested this this technology.

So. It’s pretty great.

Allen Hall: Next up is Itrec from the Netherlands and they have a offshore blade installation technique or tool that they developed. And it, well, the way I looked at this, it looks like a praying mantis almost that grabs onto the tower and then you take the blade on the back of the praying mantis up to the hub and plug in.

Philip Totaro: What’s unique and interesting about this innovation is what they’re doing is they’ve created a system where you can actually have this crane structure on the service and operation vessel. The vessel comes up to the turbine and the foundation kind of clamps on and then deploys this railing system that’ll clamp up to the upper part of the tower.

And then you can have, the blade, which is, in this clamp run up this little track that’s a removable this removable track, and then, like you said, it’ll, it’ll spin the blade around and orient it in, in the right position in order to, to get it installed and hooked up into the, into the hub.

So of all the ideas I’ve seen. About having this kind of construction or service and repair type of system. This is actually one of the more clever ones. But keep in mind that this company in Holland that’s developed the technology, they, this is just a patent at this point. They are trying to get somebody interested in prototyping this and, and actually commercially developing it.

So we hope that they’re successful with it. Because this actually is pretty, not only pretty clever but it’s, it’s something that’s probably a little easier to implement and safer to implement than some of the other concepts that we’ve seen. And we’re going to move down to Spain now,

Allen Hall: Phil, with Burriti Mint Marine Time.

And they have a patent that just come out, which talks about building a floating structure, a floating wind turbine structure. But it’s a series of walls that get assembled into like this triangular shape. And you

Philip Totaro: want to describe this a little bit. It’s modular in the sense that they, they can do something key side where they can assemble, whatever the structure is and with, the levels of buoyancy that they need for, for, the, the size of turbine they’re going to install.

They can assemble this quayside, and then bolt it together as it’s going in the water, and then you can take, with your quayside crane, and plop the turbine, fully assembled on this thing, and then float it out. So it’s, it’s pretty clever in terms of what they’re doing, and then the way they’ve designed it, it can either serve as a, a moored floating structure, or kind of like a, almost a tension like platform, where you would have different legs, tethered legs, basically coming off the bottom of this thing.

This is a very early stage innovation at this point, and we hope that they can, can pursue it. There’s obviously a lot of different floating structure designs and concepts out there already. But this is one that actually has some promise based on the modularity of it and the fact that you could actually assemble it Keysight with whatever.

Structure you needed to, to be able to assemble for, for, something that’s purpose built for a particular turbine model.

Allen Hall: Last

Philip Totaro: but

Allen Hall: not least, Phil, the motorized ice cream cone. Hey, this patent technology needs to be applied rapidly because, based on what the sketches

Philip Totaro: show, this is pretty cool.

Alright, so this isn’t, strictly speaking, wind energy, but we’re gonna try to find some of these fun patents that people have come up with over the years. So, this one, it’s, it’s real interesting. There’s actually, basically the premise of it is, you can have your ice cream in a little cup on top of your cone, and the cone has a little gear mechanism in it, so that I, sorry, I can’t even get through this without laughing, but, it’ll, it’ll automatically rotate, The, the, your ice cream so that you can just stick your tongue out and lick and you don’t have to hand rotate Your ice cream cone and worry about the ice cream dripping down on on your hands So, I I’ve I’ve seen lots of things that are over engineered in my time This is probably one of them But this is also You know a pretty clever idea.

I don’t know that the world needs this Alan

Allen Hall: There’s upsides and downsides to this bill. One is that you don’t have to Do anything to heat your ice cream, I guess, besides hold it. Downside is you need a battery, right? So without the battery, this thing doesn’t go. So it doesn’t, didn’t seem to have a USB port to charge it.

That’s the next patent, a USB chargeable ice cream cone. There you go. Like everything else in the world. Heh heh heh heh heh. You think the Europeans are gonna make us use a USB C or a USB lightning cable? Huh? Which one is it?

Philip Totaro: USB C. Nah, they’ve already decided. Everything, everything’s gotta be standardized.

Allen Hall: Well, there you have it. There’s three really interesting wind patents and one crazy patent for you this week. Thanks, Phil, for bringing these ideas to the table.