BladeBUG: Ultrasonic Inspections of Blade Damage

Wind turbine composite blades can cleverly conceal damage beneath the paint, evading detection by drone inspections. Enter BladeBUG: equipped with ultrasound sensors, this innovative robot uncovers hidden faults lurking within the blade. In an exclusive interview at WindEurope 2023 in Copenhagen, Denmark, Allen and Joel engage with Chris Cieslak, the Director of BladeBUG, to delve into the world of BladeBUG. PowerCurve - https://powercurve.dkPardalote 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!  Bladebug Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, where we feature the latest advancements in wind energy technology. I'm your host, Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, along with my co-host Joel Saxum vice President of North American Sales for Wind Power LAB and we are here at Wind Europe 2023 in Copenhagen. Denmark and we are fortunate to, fortunate to have with us Chris Che, the director at Blade Bug, to give us an update on all things Blade bug. Chris, welcome back to  Chris Cieslak: Thanks very much. I thought fortunate it's the right word, but yeah, pleasure to be back here. I'm very fortunate to be here.  Allen Hall: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, so there's a lot has happened since we have spoken to you last, you've been a frequent guest on, on the podcast. Thank goodness. I'm glad to have you, but, Yeah, blade Bugs made a number of improvements. Since the last time we've seen you, we, we saw you last in Hamburg, Germany. You wanna give us an update on things that are happening? Yeah,  Chris Cieslak: so when we last spoke in Hamburg, we were presenting our robot and we've been developing and refining our ultrasonic non-destructive testing capabilities on blades. And so we've spent a couple of, we spent winters basically hunker down refining a couple of different OEM systems in our. Platform. So our robotic platform, we've got a, a form of ultrasonic inspection using a, a technology called like four Matrixx capture, which is really interesting. It gives a, a very nice visual indication of, of defects and composites. And then we're also using a more classical ut approach of phased array. Okay. Which gives us, you know, a very consistent approach of inspecting composition that's been used for 20, 30 years. So  Allen Hall: why one  Chris Cieslak: over the other? Because I think it's, there's, there isn't one shoe that fits all. So it's a case of the ability or the beauty of having a platform such as Blade Bug is you can have a solution, be it with different equipment to overcome a challenge that you're looking for on a blade. Yeah. So if you have a particular issue on a blade in a certain location, it might be that laminate is too thick for the frequency of the probe of one type of equipment. You can change it to your other Thing and go, right, this is, yeah. For this particular area for, for this particular inspection task, I can use this equipment. And for the other one it's, it's that, so okay. It's about having the flexibility to ensure that you can do the job at hand essentially. Right? Yeah. For those  Joel Saxum: who don't know blades that well, I mean, you can be in the root section and you can have four inches of, of material. Yeah. You can go out to the tip and you can be down to a quarter inch. Yeah. Right. So having the right tool for the right job gotta have  Chris Cieslak: it.