Show notes
Allen Hall speaks with Helicoid Industries' Dr. Lorenzo Mencattelli about their groundbreaking wind turbine blade LEP technology, which uses a biomimetic fiber pattern inspired by mantis shrimp. Their solution reduces erosion damage by 70% and can work with existing materials and manufacturing processes.
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Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.
Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Alan Hall, and today we're discussing one of the most persistent challenges in the wind energy industry, beating edge erosion on the wind turbine blades. To discuss an innovative solution to this problem, we're joined by Dr. Lorenzo Micatelli, the Managing Director of Tech and Ops at Helicoid Industries.
At Helicoid Industries, Lorenzo is spearheading the development of a groundbreaking technology that could significantly reduce leading edge erosion damage on wind turbine blades. Lorenzo. Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Lorenzo Mencattelli: Thank you very much, Allen for having me.
Allen Hall: So leading edge erosion is one of those top issues, and I first ran across your company at DTU, at the Leading Edge Erosion Conference, and all the experts all around the world were there.
I think it was in February or March earlier this year. And I sat through all the presentations and then Helichord came up and gave a presentation, and I was astounded because I hadn't seen anything like this technology before. But first I want to talk about how big of a problem this is, and I think during that DTU conference we realized it's a couple percentage points of power loss for a lot of operators, and it's structural damage when leading edge erosion penetrates through the shell of a winter blade.
That's a huge problem.
Lorenzo Mencattelli: Yeah, exactly. So the, the, the small percentage power loss is often acceptable if you want, because it doesn't really force the operator to, to stop the blade and, and perform maintenance and repair. But when the erosion gets to the composite substrate and therefore the structural integrity of the blade is compromised, then it carries a whole lot of other issues.
And, and then operations need to stop.
Allen Hall: Yeah, and that's where you see all the repair work going on, particularly in the United States, in the middle of the United States, where leading edge erosion has penetrated to the shell, and the amount of time and effort of independent people. service providers going and fixing blades, leading edge erosion is a, is an industry upon its own.
And it's a little shocking actually that your technology hasn't been used yet. I want to just describe it here in a second because the, right now in order to prevent leading edge erosion out of the OEMs, the manufacturer's equipment, you have to apply Plastic, basically plastic shells or rubberized plastic shells or put some sort of thick coating on to the blades, which is somewhat effective.
I would say it's going to give you a couple of years of life, but there really hasn't been a true fix.
Lorenzo Mencattelli: Yeah, so the, the focus indeed has been mainly on developing new solutions for the coating, right? That is applied on the, on the leading edge, while there is no be any engineering on the composite substrate underneath.
And the reality of things is is that the operator, you know, spin their blades way beyond the erosion of the coating. So initially when we deployed. When we thought of this solution, we wanted to find something that would work together with the coating. So initially, we are not considering replacing entirely the coating with our fiber architecture.
But the idea is to give the operator an extra margin of safety once the coating has been eroded to keep their blade spinning, produce energy and not worry about having issues of structural integrity because now the composite substrate has the strength to endure that erosion.
Allen Hall: Yeah, and the failure mode on the structural side as it was described in your presentation, was the resin.
Basically, the plastic that holds everything together, right? That the fibers go typically at 090 if you're biaxial, and then you have these, these little pockets that are resin, and unsupported resin, has trouble in rain erosion. So it wants to be eaten away. And once you start to break that resin down, you get through one layer, then the next layer, the next layer.
Pretty soon your, your fiber doesn't have any support structure. It gets eroded away. And then you're through the blade. Now Your solution is really unique in the sense that you've thought about the way lineage erosion happens, but you've also sort of tied it to the animal world. I want you to describe that for a second.
Like, how did this idea come up and, and sort of describe how that animal world translates into materials?
Lorenzo Mencattelli: Yeah, so this is actually part of a discipline called biomimicry, where we take inspiration from features and some aspects of creatures and plants that can be found in nature. And trying to understand the relationship between the features that we observe and their function and then translate that into engineering principle and apply to material systems and so on.
So in this case, we we got inspiration from this specific microstructure that can be found actually in a wide range of creatures, including the mantis shrimp which is our mascot, if you want. And the shrimp uses it's club to strike praise. It feeds on, it deploys underwater at very high speed caliber bullet speed, and it, it manages to crack shells of creatures which are considered to be quite tough themselves.
So if you look inside the club, you will see that this is in fact, a fiber reinforced composite structures is made out of unidirectional layers, which are slightly rotated one to respect to each other. to form this helicoidal distribution of fibers. So we are mimicking that and we initially deployed that solution for improving impact performance of of a wide range of applications from aerospace, automotive and so forth.
And then we started thinking whether The same architecture could have been beneficial. So, so for, for rain erosion, because eventually the, the rain, the rain droplet is a low mass, high frequency, high speed type of impact that happens in an area of the, of the blade. And by orienting and redistributing into an helicoidal way, the fibers in the composite substrate, we are able to better redistribute stresses.
That follows from the from the high velocity impact of the rain droplet, and therefore the structure is able to endure more impacts without an early on onset of erosion.
Allen Hall: So, if you go to Helicoid's website, which is helicoidind. com, you will see this mantis shrimp hammer, and the sort of microscopic images of it, and it, it is a series of fibers.
It looks like a composite structure. It's very interesting, by the way, so everybody should go look at that. But you're right, it, the, the mantis shrimp has this helicoid pattern. type of arrangement of the fiber, which is much more tightly packed. So instead of zero 90 or plus or minus 45, how we typically do things in composite world, it's, it's every 15 degrees, maybe every 10 degrees, it's the, the pattern starts to rotate.
So it's, it makes a much more Dents, fiber composite structure, and as you mentioned, composite structures are not forgiving on impacts. In the airplane world, which I've worked for a long time, that thing about composites around landing gear is any kind of rock that gets thrown up makes a dent and it damages it immediately.
It's a constant problem. It's a constant repair problem, much like in wind turbines. This layering of the fabric and at different orientations then does create this little bit of a different structure. What happens when you put this structure, and I want to put a little framework around this, using existing materials, existing resin systems, existing fibers, I reorient those fibers in a much more prescribed way.
What happens when you take it to rain erosion testing? What do you see?
Lorenzo Mencattelli: Well, what it happens is you don't see erosion for quite a few a few hours of testing. So we have we have done extensive rain erosion testing comparing a conventional substrate, as you mentioned, a plus minus 45 zero degree fiber, fiber orientation substrate, and we use the exact same fiber, the exact same resin, the exact same manufacturing process, but with our helicoid design leading edge.
To show that instead of getting larger chips of material being removed very quickly as the erosion progresses in our case, we have a very smooth and slow erosion of the substrate. So, for once, you reduce by more than 70 percent the eroded mass under the same testing conditions. And for second, you also get a smoother erosion, which decreases the loss in performance, aerodynamic performance, and also allows for easier and faster repairs.
Because now you can probably do a light sanding to recover the the shape of the profile instead of having to do a big cutoff and repatches of the of, of the leading edge.
Allen Hall: Yeah, it's a different kind of wear effect,