Aerones: Robot Repairs Are Happening Now

Aerones is making robot repairs of wind turbines a reality. Their new robots repair leading edge damage, apply leading edge protective coatings, measure LPS resistance, and even clean towers. Dainis Kruze and Greta Krumina discuss how Aerones can dramatically reduce maintenance costs and improving performance of wind turbines all over the world. Aerones - https://aerones.comPardalote Consulting at https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWind Power Lab - https://windpowerlab.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!  Aerones Allen Hall: We are here at American Clean Power 2023 in New Orleans, Louisiana. With Aerones, and if you don't know Aerones, you have been missing out on a lot because Arons is the robot repair company, company four blades and towers now. So I have Dainis Kruze and Greta Krumina here to tell us all the great details that have happened over the last year and all the new technology because we are looking at your booth things. And there are 5, 6, 7 different robots here. This year, which some of them I've never seen before. So you would've described what you have brought to New Orleans?  Dainis Kruze: Yeah, we brought our internal crawler and we brought our cleaning robot and all of the set for leading edge repair. Okay. And since the leading edge repair needs like lot of steps to do the jobs, yeah, we help. Lot of attachments for the robot to do those, those steps.  Greta Krumina: Basically, a modular system for the leading edge repair. That's what we have launch now in the  Allen Hall: us. Okay, so let's talk leading edge repair. As we know across the United States and the world leading edge repair damage is so widespread that basically every winter has some level of leading edge damage. Dainis Kruze: Yeah. Yeah. So let's say if it's level, like if you build a new turbine Yeah. And it doesn't have the leading edge, like protection. Our technology is faster for application of the leading edge protection than for the humans on the ground, like uptower, we can do the job uptower faster than the humans on, on the ground. Okay. So  Allen Hall: you're saying if you use like the, the 3M tape kind of material that we've all seen, or the shells or the other possibility there, you're saying your system can, you can put your system on faster on turbine and they can't put their shell system on on the ground. Dainis Kruze: Yeah. Wow. That's if it's level zero, like, like basically new turbine, if it's level one erosion, like new turbine a few years. Level one, level two. We need approximately one to maximum two days to restore the leading edge and apply a new layer of leading edge protection to, to protect the, the, basically the blades. Okay. And if it's level three, we will probably need two to three days because there's a little bit more of sanding, a little bit more of fill application and unevenness. Yeah. So to make it even and smooth again. Okay. And so on. So it's fairly, very, very fast. Process apply.  Greta Krumina: What I'm saying and comparing to is that instead of having two human arms, you have at least four human arms working at the same time. That that's what the robot does.  Allen Hall: So there's, there's a, there's a stage process to this, right? We, you're going to try to fix the damage that's there. I assume you're gonna apply some sort of filler and try to provide some, get the aerodynamic smoothness back. Yeah. And, and is that one robot application to do that?