Blade Inspection – one of the main reason that the blades need to be inspected is actually the leading edges of the blades. The better leading edges you have, the more the turbine produces. The more erosion you have on the leading edges, the less the turbine produces; the less turbine produces, the less renewable energy you are getting out of it.
In order to optimize the production for the turbines, it is mandatory to maintain especially the leading edges of the blades, as that’s where the most energy is produced. So, in order to find out which blades to do this on, is necessary to inspect them more in detail.
Terral Wind offers a unique type of service, on the market, using a mobile robotic platform made of carbon fiber. The Robot is remote controlled from the ground and able to climb the tower of wind turbines or any metallic surface, by means of permanent magnets. It incorporates a high-resolution photographic camera and photographs the complete blade (its 4 surfaces) and not only damages.
This service proposes a qualitative leap in the preventive maintenance of the wind turbines, because it allows a better knowledge of the complete state of the blades at the time of inspection.
The service includes the images processing, the analyses of the images and of the possible damages by a blade experts and the Client access to a web platform to download full blades info: damage reports, photographic reports, damage pictures and wind farm summary database.
The advantages of our system, compared to the traditional methods (rope access, ground base camera, drone), are:
- Minimum distance to the blades & detection of 50% more defects;
- High quality of the photographs (best image quality) due to the proximity to the blades and the quality of the camera;
- Photographic development of the entire surface of the blade, not just the damages;
- Delimitation of the defects (location coordinates) & geometric definition of the defect. Allows to locate the damages of the blade with great precision, as well as to determine the dimensions of the damages;
- Speed of service and short turbine stop to do full inspection;
- High inspection capacity (up to 5 WTGs/day);
- Without safety risks for the workers;
- Very low dependence on weather conditions, because the Robot can operate on wide wind range and over 16m/s wind speed;
- Obtaining data of the complete blade, allowing to study the evolution of the blade over the time. Also allows re-analyzing the damages by another blade expert at any time;
- Competitive price.