Power-Up: Mitsubishi Lightning Protection, NextEra Cable Saver

This week, Allen and Phil discuss NextEra's Inventus Holdings patent to increase the longevity of cable bundles on wind turbines. And Mitsubishi Heavy Industry's system for measuring lightning current on a wind turbine blade. Plus a groundbreaking method for swinging on a swing...



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 IntelStor's Phil Totaro, as we discuss the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will charge your energy future. It's been a beautiful day. Busy week in new ideas, Phil, and our lead off for this week is a cable bundle longevity on wind turbines invention from Inventus Holdings.



And Inventus Holdings is actually who, Phil?



Philip Totaro: It's NextEra Energy's holding company for all their IP filings. So, what's interesting about this is not just the invention they came up with, but the fact that asset owners and operators in the past Let's say five to seven years have started filing patents on a lot of different technologies, including something like this, where, they wanted something that would provide them better vibration isolation for the, the cables that are running up and down the tower on a wind turbine.



And that's basically what it is. It's a, it's a cable harness. It's not particularly the sexiest sounding invention but it's the design was something developed by NextEra because of their field experience. They saw that there were a lot of cable bundles that were having abrasion related reliability issues, and they, they developed this as a means to provide some kind of vibration isolation and, and abrasion isolation for the, the cable bundles to preclude them having to go out there and, and service these things more frequently as they were having to do in the past.



So, kudos to to NextEra on developing something that's going to. Save them time and money doing field repairs. So the, the concept,



Allen Hall: it's a little hard to visualize, but if you've ever used a lathe, if you have, you're turning big objects in a lathe, you need a way to support it on one end it and let it rotate the same time.



So it looks like a lay support it's basically what it is where the harnesses can move around internally to without friction to cause damage because a lot of operators have cable damage right there at the yaw deck because the cables rub against one another and against, and against the deck, which is crazy because the resulting failure modes are ugly and timely take a bunch of time to repair and, So good on Aventus and good on NextEra for coming up with this idea.



So our next idea is a lightning protection system for turban blades from MHI, Mitsubishi Heavy Industry. And this one's a little unique. It's sort of in my ballpark here in the lightning world. Where they're trying to measure lightning current, where it attaches to the blade, and they're envisioning, the Mitsubishi engineers are envisioning, putting a metal leading edge on a portion of the blade near the tip, obviously, and then having a metal tip, and to measure the current on each one of those, to see where lightning is striking on the blade.



It seems rather simple at first, Phil, but I think the implementation of this can be difficult.



Philip Totaro: Yeah, and it's, it's funny because, I mean,