Standardizing Rain Erosion Testing Results with Wind Power LAB’s Rocky Software

Rocky, a cloud-based software developed by Wind Power LAB is helping to standardize the analysis of rain erosion test data for wind turbine coatings. By precisely annotating damage progression in test photos, Rocky eliminates human variability in interpreting results and generating accurate velocity vs. impact (V-N) curves. This innovative tool promises to improve coating durability predictions, reduce operational costs, and accelerate rain erosion solutions for the wind industry. Visit https://windpowerlab.com/ for more info!



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Allen Hall: Welcome to the special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm Allen Hall, and I'm in San Diego, warm San Diego with at ACP OM&S and I'm here with Anders Røpke, who is this founding partner and CEO of Wind Power LAB based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Welcome to the show.



Anders Røpke: Thank for the invitation.



Allen Hall: So we're gonna have a really technical discussion, but a really timely discussion. Yeah, about rain erosion and rain erosion testing. I was just over in Denmark, went to DTU, saw the Leading Edge Erosion Conference. Fascinated, great speakers, a lot of great data. One of the main discussion points was when you run a rain erosion test on a particular coating for a wind turbine, there's a lot of variability.



And the holy grail is to get what they call a V N curve for a coating. That's the velocity versus the number of impacts. You should be able to draw roughly a straight line. Okay. When I was over at Copenhagen, and watching all this go on, there's a lot of slides up about V in curves where the V in curve was up and down.



The tilt of it was all over the place. When they had done testing at different rain erosion facilities, or had tested in the same erosion facility on the same kind of sample. Getting what they thought was a different result. Now, that seems to be driven by in part, the human element. Exactly. Everything about that test is pretty well controlled and the people at R&D test systems, which designed those rain erosion rigs have made a really nice machine.



Let's just be honest. It's a really good machine. But as when PowerLab is determining, the issue is looking at the photos of the damage and then saying, Oh, here's where damage starts. And this is how it propagates. That's a human element problem that's added to this very technical decision making. We're making errors there.



And that's where Wind Power LAB comes in. And at Wind Power LAB, you guys are blade experts, right?



Anders Røpke: We are blade experts. So we are actually coming from the field observation side, if you like. So we see the products when they fail. Sorry to bring the bad news, but we see leading edge erosion out there still, even though we have big LEP campaigns.



Yeah. And one thing is the application, it's a hard environment to turn out offshore, for instance. But we also see coatings fail earlier than anticipated. And the long term effect is a lot of unnecessary cost for these wind farm owners. Because then they're looking into yet one more LEP campaign.



Through the end of, before the end of life of this wind farm. That's extremely expensive. Onshore, but it's maybe 20 times more expensive offshore. It is. So if we should fix this. We should. We should. Then why don't we try to test our products a little bit better?



And that's where the Leading Edge Erosion Symposium you visited.



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