DTU and R&D Test Systems Open Cutting-Edge Rain Erosion Facility

Allen Hall interviews Nicolai Johansen and Jesper Dal Hasager at DTU's brand new R&D Rain Erosion Facility for testing leading edge erosion on wind turbine blades. They discuss the unique features and capabilities that make this one of the most sophisticated erosion testing rigs in the world. Visit https://wind.dtu.dk/facilities/leading-edge-erosion-test-facility for more info! 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! Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Allen Hall: Welcome to the special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, and I am in Roskilde, Denmark, with the folks from DTU and R&D Test Systems, because we have a brand new rain erosion facility. And I've just been attending the 5th Symposium on Leading Edge Erosion this week, and there's been a tremendous amount of new technical knowledge and test results and computational efforts going on across the world. And it's time to talk about the real issues. rubber hit the road part, which is the rain erosion testing. And I have here today, Nicolai Johansen with DTU the Risø campus, which is the wind energy and energy system. Energy systems department. Yes, we just had a magnificent tour of the facility, and there's some amazing pieces here. I didn't realize what kind of technology DTU has. It's astounding. It's quite nice. It's better than anything I've seen in the United States. You should be proud of it. It's really nice. And this is one of those new facilities that has been built by Jesper Dal Hasager, who is with R&D Test Systems. So welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Thank you. This is impressive. So I, we have talked to R&D Test Systems in the past about a lot of different things, one of them, rain erosion test facilities, that this is a kind of a standard thing that R&D Test Systems does. because there's such a big demand for it. Jesper Dal Hasager: Exactly. Allen Hall: And I haven't seen this up close, but seeing it up here now, this is amazing. This is a really nice setup. Thought out. And this setup is the most advanced one in the world at the moment. Exactly. So you want to describe what makes this the most advanced main erosion test facility? Jesper Dal Hasager: Yeah, first of all the test chamber is larger than normal. One belt. It's we normally either we deliver the system within two containers. Allen Hall: Okay. Jesper Dal Hasager: Two 20 feet containers, high cube containers. Or we can deliver it into a building so we can integrate it in a customer building Sure. Solution if they want to have a building instead of this modular. But then we have thought of a lot of these containers. It's not, that's nice to look at this container, but still a building is very expensive for It's yes. For our customer to build themselves. Sure. So we designed a middle way in this one. Where we have this steel structure that we have welded in our workshop in Hinderup and, yeah. And then we have mounted these sandwich panels with 80 millimeters insulation. Allen Hall: Yes, it's quite warm in here. Yeah, exactly. It feels good. It's because it's cold outside. Jesper Dal Hasager: Yeah, exactly. So that should both cope for the temperature and for sound dampening. Yes. Because it's a very loud machine when it's beginning to turn around. Allen Hall: That's very smart design because I think a lot of people wouldn't think about those design details of just the day to day operation.