Aging is a fact of life. For wind farm operators, this is an increasingly important challenge to grapple with. Many data sources point to a direct correlation between asset age and performance. This is especially true for wind turbine blades.
"The erosion at the leading edge of wind turbine blades reduces the airfoil lift by up to 23% and drag by 100%, reducing the aerodynamic efficiency, which in effect reduces annual energy production by up to 4%."
- Source: Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, December 2019
Given the variable factors around wind for wind farms, it is important to ensure the maintenance and upkeep of these assets are regularly performed. This pressure often falls on engineers on-site to develop innovative and creative approaches to solve these challenges. Such maintenance has historically been costly and can excessively impact the viability of wind farms.
Rope teams repairing a wind turbine blade
Traditional maintenance methods:
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Specialized rope access teams and coordination with onsite operators.
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One blade being inspected at a time while in the down position.
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Missing up to 10–20% of faults on blade visual inspections
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Manual and time-consuming consolidation of reporting
Outcome:
Many thousands of dollars in production losses and days of unnecessary downtime per turbine.
Workflows are progressing with the adoption of UAV programs providing a range of benefits previously unavailable, including:
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Reducing the downtime to conduct inspections
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A safer working environment for rope crews
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High-quality images and videos to make better assessments in a measured way
However, drone data has a drawback, as any drone pilot or drone program lead will testify. There is a rapid build-up of vast amounts of data being captured, which is equally time-consuming for teams to manually review, clip, distribute, and report images and video.
Performing and ensuring the proper maintenance and fault-finding of assets is a key task of engineers on-site, and there is a delicate balance between delivering optimal asset performance and the costs of detecting such faults.
All this needs to be achieved with the business's various software management tools and databases.
With Unleash live, blade inspections can be performed 5x faster and at half the cost vs current approaches
What is Unleash live, and how does it benefit what I do?
Unleash live is an A.I. video analytics enterprise solution provider. We take vision from any camera and combine it with computer vision to deliver actionable data in real time so that your organization has immediate insights to drive down costs, improve productivity, increase accuracy, and improve safety.
A centralized location for all raw and analyzed data accessible for teams in the office, in the field, and on the go.
Unleash live speeds up your inspection workflow
1. Perform real-time analytics to detect...
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Leading-edge erosion.
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Leading-edge Tape damage.
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Paint damage, pinholes.
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Turbine split separation.
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Vortex generator panel.
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Vortex generator panel missing teeth.
2. Collaborate share all media, devices, and insights from any browser
Discover how Unleash live's Media Drive can enhance your inspection workflow by allowing you to collaborate and share media and insights from any browser, all while storing all raw and analyzed data in one centralized location.
3. View faults geographically
4. Collaborate and view live inspections remotely
5. Annotate the faults on Blade using Smart Annotation Tools
6. Summarize and export the report into PDF
Exporting the annotations file into the required format makes the work more efficient. After an asset has been annotated, whether manually or by AI, users can now summarize the annotation results for a folder or set of images. They can then filter and summarize these annotations based on annotation type, faults, and severity of faults before exporting them to a PDF report, CSV file, or JSON.
The pdf report is usually sent to the maintenance team for repair and maintenance planning and execution. It can be done in the Unleash live platform with very simple and easy steps. Learn to export annotations.
What does this mean for wind farm operators?
Operators can reduce the resources required for manual inspections with the use of A.I. to detect damage, augment the role of people operating the process to supervising the process and reduce cost, operational overhead and speed to action by eliminating the need for rope access or helicopters by bringing decision-makers to collaborate in real-time over live video.
Leverage live video collaboration for:
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Reducing the need to attend site visits
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Make working remotely (or on weekends) easier
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Promoting a safe working culture on the site
Centrally stored data across all contractors and internal teams:
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Support daily management sharing
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Securely provide 3rd party contractors access to footage without needing an account
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Minimize the number of managed contracted service providers that will be utilized on-site
