Show notes
Max Le Tallec from SOCOMORE speaks about their new SOCOBLADE product, in partnership with Hontek. The product was originally created to protect military helicopters, and is now an LEP solution that reduces downtime, maintenance costs, and power losses.
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Allen Hall: Imagine spending half a million dollars on leading edge repairs only to watch them fail again in just 18 months. That's the reality many wind operators face today. This week on the Uptime Spotlight, Max Le Tallec joins us from Socomore to discuss how helicopter technology designed to withstand combat conditions is now protecting wind turbine blades.
The wait for a military grade leading edge solution is finally over.
Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind Energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.
Allen Hall: Max, welcome to the program.
Maxime Le Tallec: Thank you. Thanks for welcoming me.
Allen Hall: I think we're gonna talk leading edge erosion and what to do about it. I want to back up a little bit because there's a lot of operators with a lot of leading edge erosion. Why should they care about the leading edge erosion? Why does that matter?
Maxime Le Tallec: The, we've seen the blade today been eroded, almost destroyed with holes of the size [00:01:00] of a fist which. Create issues on the aerodynamics of the blade and the downtime and major repairs or major downtimes on the blade.
Allen Hall: Yeah. And that turns into a lot of expensive repairs, obviously.
And we're also hearing from a lot of operators about the power. Loss of you hear numbers from anywhere from a fraction of a percent to somewhere north of three 4%. Are you hearing those same sort of things? Just the power loss gets to be so expensive.
Maxime Le Tallec: Yes. And even up to five certain are saying so that's why you need to be preventive on this aspect and actually not to wait for the damage to come on the plate.
Joel Saxum: I think that when we talk a EP loss, it's exacerbated even more in the market nowadays when we're starting to look at these 5.5, 6.1, 6.8, and I'm just talking about onshore turbines, these big megawatt turbines. If you're losing 1% from that big turbine, that's a lot more than it would've been, 10, 15 years ago on a GE 1.5, or you're not lo, you're [00:02:00] losing, but 1% doesn't hurt you as much.
But when you start talking these big, long blades, like everybody has to have a leading edge, erosion, leading edge. Protection strategy in place to make sure that they don't get to that point where they have big repairs or they're losing a bunch of production. Are you, are operators engaging with you guys now with your with the new product? Socoblade?
Maxime Le Tallec: Yes. A lot of companies, so our product today has been on the market for a while. This is the non-tech technology, which actually we scale up today. So we've worked for more than a year now with Ontech to scale up the manufacturing, to make the product available worldwide. So the product is pretty well known already in North America and the world spread farms to farms.
Now with our headquarter in Europe and our local forces we are reaching more and more European farms as well. We've seen a very high interest back in December during a Dusseldorf show. The everyone is coming. Yes.
Allen Hall: Yeah. That's unique. [00:03:00] So Hontek has developed a leading edge erosion, preventive coating that came from the military and on helicopters originally.
And that technology has now evolved quite a bit. Into, and a product that can be made for wind turbine blades. And the problem with Hontek was, or originally, is that there was so much demand for the product that it got really difficult to get in line to get enough of it to do your wind farm, and particularly in Europe because the Americans would use it up most quickly.
So bringing smore into this equation does. Greatly improved the likelihood of putting this Hontek product on. Now, obviously, so Sommore is a great chemical company. That's what you are. You have all kinds of technologies for a variety of industries, including aerospace, which is where I first ran across Sommore.
But this Hontek collaboration opens up a number of [00:04:00] doors for smore to really help the wind operator, correct?
Maxime Le Tallec: Yes, of course. We, the product today is designed to be rolled on damaged turbine or as a preventative leading edge protection. But now thanks to our collaboration, we're freeing ontech to keep developing new solution and adapt to the new challenges that the farms are meeting.
The product that we have today, as we were seeing is actually the result of 30 years of development BioNTech. So they come from far and they tremendously. Analyze and develop the product to meet the exact field need.
Allen Hall: And that's huge, right? That, that the product has so much service history that in aerospace and now on wind turbines and the word of mouth spread very quickly that service history is something that smore is using.
To to explore other markets with and to grow the wind base. That is really critical because I think when you see a lot of new leading edge erosion [00:05:00] products pop up, they have maybe six months of service life at best, or it's a brand new product for a 2025. Okay, great, but what am I gonna spend a hundred K, 200 K, 500 k putting this on my turbines when it don't and have a lot of history.
Samore provides all that. All that data, all that history with this product. And can you explain like all the effort that went into this product to get to here?
Maxime Le Tallec: So as you were saying, the backbone of the chemistry is coming or has been used by the military in the past. And over the past years, the product has been challenged against different aerospace testing, military testing so under way more severe.
Conditions that the wind tests are currently with tremendous results. So that's where we are always pushing the limit higher and higher.
Joel Saxum: You know, as Alan and I, of course we're talking with operators all the time and ISPs across the wind space and globally really. [00:06:00] But a lot of people in the US.
You talk, you mention the word Hantek and Ooh, that stuff's good. Ooh, that stuff's good. But as we all know, if you've been in wind or if you've been around blades at all, a product that's installed on a blade is only as good as its installation. Can you tell us a little bit about how you guys install this or how the Hontek stuff is applied and it doesn't have to be versus other part products in the market?
Just how is it applied? So we're making life easy on a technician so they get a good end product, one particular of our products.
Maxime Le Tallec: So that's a two component products. We need to warm one of the part for preparation is one of the specificity. We recommend some equipment that can be used actually at the back of a truck.
So no matter where the turbine, we can actually prepare the solution. Then pouring the part A in the Part B, you get your can. Ready to go, and that's a rollable solution. So you have your roller. The product has been designed for the, I would say, the most complicated application for ropers.
And the rollable application is [00:07:00] actually very forgiving. So no matter if you splash a bit, if you swing a bit on the blade you can easily correct the application and make it clean and lean all along the leading edge. We've designed the kit just to cover one blade at a time. So everything has been thought for the epi for the operator.
Sorry. To be easy for the application.
Allen Hall: Oh, that's so critical, right? Because you don't wanna mix a bunch of the product together and have to paint three turbines at a time. You want to do it one blade at a time, and obviously soccer more. Is really good at packaging and making this simple for the technician on site.
Now, there are really two different versions of the same product. You want to de describe what those differences are?
Maxime Le Tallec: Yeah, so we talk about LEP two 20 and LEP two 20 age. The two 20 has been developed for dri drier environment, more cheek, so low humidity. Where the 2 23 8 has a way wider conditions, window of application from [00:08:00] 35 to 95 relative humidity.
So the technology of the product is moisture secure, so it will actually cure with the ambient moisture in the air.
Allen Hall: So it's sim it's similar to a superglue, right? Superglue cures with humidity in the air. And so you need a little bit of humidity to make this work. However, if you look at other products, I think this is why the Hontek product is so well loved, is that.
You could be in dry Texas, New Mexico, places that are hot and pretty dry, and you can apply it. You can apply it offshore where the humidity is exactly 95%. And how do you do that? A lot of other products don't have that variability or they have trouble in there. They don't cure up. Quite as nice. The Huntec product basically removes all those barriers.
Max, you have this mixture. It does magic. It's applied generally with rollers. I thought I have seen it applied with different methods though. Are there other ways to apply it beyond roller?
Maxime Le Tallec: So there is [00:09:00] a brushable application possible as well and we are customizing the product to be applicable through robot.
We've seen more and more robot application nowadays. And we want to make sure to, that's.