Show notes
ONYX Insight's ecoPITCH system prevents catastrophic wind turbine blade failures caused by pitch bearing issues. Forrest French and Martin McLarnon reveal how continuous monitoring and early detection can save wind farms millions.
Contact Martin McLarnon: [email protected]
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!
Allen Hall: ONYX Insight's ecoPITCH monitoring system has become crucial for wind farm operators facing blade root insert failures. These failures start invisibly but can end catastrophically with blades detaching completely. This week we speak with Forrest French Senior Project Engineer, and Martin McLarnon, sales Director for North America at ONYX Insight.
Their ecoPITCH system detects dangerous movements before visible signs appear as Forest notes in the interview. By the time you can get a feeler gauge measurement, it's probably too late. So join us to discover how data-driven monitoring is helping operators make smarter maintenance decisions preventing million dollar disasters and keeping turbines spinning safely.
Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.
Allen Hall: Martin and Forest. Welcome to the [00:01:00] show. Hello. How's it going? Thanks for letting us. Yeah, we're really interested to, to talk to you today just because there's so many blade root issues from pitch bearings and blade bushings or inserts as they're called sometimes, and a number of other issues. And when we talk to operators, what they tell us is, oh, we, you use ecoPITCH.
And they love that system. But I want to, I wanna back up first and talk about what are some of the operators experiencing out there in the field And ecoPITCH system was originally developed to look at pitch bearing problems and forests. What are some of those pitch bearing problems you're seeing out in the field today?
Forrest French: Yeah, so it, it, it's a funny story. It was originally developed for pitch bearing, uh, applications. Um, the industry as a whole started experiencing this root insert issue, so we were able to, we were kind of in a perfect position, right? It was, it was a, it was a [00:02:00] really serendipitous thing that we, we had just developed this product and we could easily pivot.
To measure both the pitch bearing and this root insert issue. Uh, the, the pitch bearing issues are admittedly the, the more difficult, uh, issue, right? To measure. Um, there's, there's some, some great opportunities for value and there's also some really good challenges to come along with that. Um, pitch bearings, uh, they, they don't rotate quickly.
Right. Uh, when, when we talk about typical CMS typical vibration monitoring, you're looking at a very, very fast rotating, uh, shaft or bearing, et cetera, and you're able to pick up on those frequencies as they revolve. You don't get that with a pitch bearing. It's a very slow moving, uh, slewing bearing. Um, so picking up.
Noise through vibration can be very difficult, uh, because again, you don't get that frequency of that [00:03:00] rotation, so you're left with nothing but uh, a bunch of noise. Right. And you're hoping that that noise floor is low enough that you might capture a bit of crunching of cage material or anything like that?
Right. The alternative in what, in what we use ecoPITCH for is it's very simple. We, we point a an inductive displacement sensor right at the pitch bearing itself. Typically the inner ring, depending on the type of turbine. And what we're looking for is any kind of slop or displacement between the inner and outer ring.
And there's always gonna be some, right. Uh, but, but what we're looking for is. Is a change in the amount of, of movement between those two rings, which may indicate falling or, or other failure modes within the raceways. The challenges come along when you have failure modes that maybe, maybe don't show themselves right through that displacement because it's absolutely possible to, to completely lock [00:04:00] up a bearing while, while showing almost no displacement.
So there's, there's, there are challenges to come along with this, so, so. ecoPITCH is great for pitch bearings, but it really needs to be coupled with good visual inspections by the sites to make sure that that bearing's not spitting out cage material right. And something that, that maybe isn't being seen in the data.
Allen Hall: So those measurements are important.
Right? And it's very difficult to go up there every month or two and try to take those measurements. Are there signs on the outside that everybody should be watching for? I know when we were on site a number of times. If there's a pitch bearing problem, you typically see grease on the outside of the blade, near the root area.
Is that the, the main source of detection at the moment?
Forrest French: Yeah. And, and you know, I think, I think every operator's gonna have a different way of looking for this stuff. It's, it's not there, there's not a, uh, a very uniform strategy, I would say. Um, but really what they're gonna be [00:05:00] looking for yeah. Is, is exactly that.
It's gonna be grease purging out of the seals. Um, it's gonna be the seals themselves blowing out. Right. Um, that's, uh, cage material. Coming out of the seals is a, is obviously gonna tell you that you've got some, some, uh, some balls inside your bearing that are getting locked up and pulling the cage to bits, right?
And that's what's gonna happen when that displacement I was talking about gets severe. So you get severe displacement. It jams up a ball, but you continue to pitch. So other balls continue to move and you kind of shred that cage and it starts spitting that material out, damaging the seal. Um, so it's, it's a whole process.
Yeah.
Allen Hall: So if you see grease on the outside, the seal is blown. And more than likely, if you look on the ground, you're gonna see metal shards.
Forrest French: Potentially, yeah. Depending on what kind of collars and stuff you have. Uh, but, but yeah, usually a lot of those, a lot of those shards and, and that, that metal material is gonna get captured in a lot of that grease.
Um, so really it's just gonna turn your [00:06:00] hub into a greasy metal mess. Right. It's, it's still fun to be in those, those hubs. For sure. Well,
Allen Hall: let's talk blade uh, inserts or bushings. What do you typically see if you're walking around a farm? When a blade bushing is starting to fail, what's the indicator from the ground?
Forrest French: From the ground? It's difficult. Um, what, what we've seen typically is you're gonna see a, uh, and, and again, this, this depends on the turbine, uh, whether it's an electrically driven turbine or a hydraulically driven, uh, pitch bearing, sorry. Um, with the electrically driven pitch bearings, it's a little bit easier to spot these issues.
You've, you've got. Uh, when, when the bushing starts to fail, it will basically spit out some of this, they call it dust, like a metal dust basically. And that dust will kind of make its way out onto the outside of the blade usually. So. From the Nelle, for example, you might pop your head out the hatch, do a visual inspection of the outside of the root, [00:07:00] and you might see some of that dusting heading down, down the blade.
That's a good indicator that, that you've potentially got an issue. It's, it's not a, a, a, a sure thing at that point. Right. Um, because there's a lot of places where metal can can make its way into the system with the hydraulically driven turbines that. Indicator gets a lot more difficult. Um, if anybody, you know, and I'm sure a lot of the folks on the call have some of these turbines, they're a mess usually, right?
Um, if, if, if any bit of debris gets loose, it's gonna knock off a bunch of hydraulic lines and it's gonna make an absolute mess. And any material that's being spit out by those bushings, it's just gonna get. Caught up in all that hydraulic oil, and again, it's just gonna turn into a mess and you're not really gonna know one from the other at that point.
You're really just left with, with uh, uh, kind of your more rudimentary ways of looking for this and some of your [00:08:00] more labor intensive ways of looking for this
Allen Hall: force. There's a lot of ways to inspect the blade root insert. Bushing issue as the blade moves around and I, I've seen some of these, uh, sites where they got a technician who climbs up in there and he is got a feeler gauge of some sort.
Is that really an effective way to, to even measure that problem?
Forrest French: Yeah. The, the feeler gauge method is. Is better than nothing. Right? You're, you're doing something at that point. What, what we've found historically is that by the time you can really get a feeler gauge measurement, uh, it's probably too late.
At that point, you, you're seeing a significant enough gap that you can get material in there. It's, it's a, you've got a big problem on your hands. We also see paired with that, um. We see folks doing a dial indicator measurement, right? Where you're taking sta uh, dial indicators, you're placing them around the circumference of the blade, and that usually involves pitching the blade out, cantilever, and then you, you just rotate the blade, and that's in that [00:09:00]static position.
You're not actually rotating the hub. That is, is definitely better than something like a feeler gauge methodology. The, the, the,