Power-Up: Fillable Blades, Up-Tower Gearbox Repair

This week on Uptime Power-Up, an idea from Takkion for re-boring the gearbox and adding an insert without needing cranes and a method from Alliance for Sustainable Energy for a fillable wind turbine blade. Plus a way to rest your head while standing up. 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 Power-Up, the Uptime podcast focused on the new hot off the press technology that can change the world. Follow along with me, Allen Hall, and idasaur's Phil Totaro, as we discuss the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will charge your energy future. Alright guys, this week some really interesting ideas on the docket. This first one has to do with replacing parts of a gearbox. If you've been around gearboxes long enough, you realize that there's a nice set of bearings in them and sometimes the bearings get overloaded. And they start to spin inside the housing. When that happens, it creates some unevenness and you essentially have to pull the gearbox out of the turbine, sit on the ground and work on it or replace it. But this idea from Renew Energy Maintenance, which is a part of Takkion now, I believe, has a way of basically taking some, some machinery, some equipment up tower and re boring. This gearbox, we're putting an insert in or a sleeve in so that the bearing can be set properly so that the gearbox then functions correctly. Now Phil, this is a big money saver, right? To have a piece of equipment that saves you from bringing in a crane? Philip Totaro: Well, it, and it's not only that, it's the fact that, on site maintenance is something that's always subject to a certain level of precision. But when you start talking about doing gearbox repairs and replacements, and this is, as you're mentioning, if you basically have a situation where the bearing raceway kind of machined itself out, you're probably gonna have to fit something new in there. But in order to do that, you've got to kind of refresh the bore. And so what this idea is, is effectively a tool that allows you to rebore this hole and stick a sleeve in there, then put the bearing, the new bearing raceway in there so that everything still kind of fits in a, in a compliant way. On the original gearbox housing. But it's doing so, like you mentioned, in a way that it doesn't require a huge crane for lifting the gearbox out and lowering it to the ground, where you would normally want to do repairs. Of this level of precision when, when we talk about doing up tower repairs on like a blade, you might be able to, to get away with, shaving things down up there and while guys are dangling off and ladies are dangling off ropes and, and whatnot. These, these technicians. The, the reality of that is there's a, there's a certain level of precision involved with that, and you can probably get away with, minor idiosyncrasies or minor variations in, in the quality of that type of work. When you're talking about boring a new hole in the gearbox housing, it has to be done with a certain level of precision in order for everything to still, fit properly, like the bearing raceways, the sleeve that they're talking about in this patent application. Everything's gotta be able to fit in a certain tolerance level. So, the fact that they've invented this tool that's gonna allow for, this repair that would normally involve a large crane pick, or, even if it's a turbine level crane pick.