During the 4th consortium meeting hosted by TWI on the 28th of May 2019, at their facilities in Cambridge, the consortium members started the discussion by focusing on the current status of the BLADESAVE system’s demonstration phase, the challenges that arose during the demonstration and how the encountered issues had been addressed. The consortium also agreed upon a set of actions to be taken in order to improve the system stability and reliability.
The second area of focus / The next topic that was discussed was the full blade destructive testing plan. The testing will take place at a facility in Denmark and it will involve producing structural damage to the blade, which will be fixed by Renewable Advice. The consortium members discussed the preparations needed to ensure that the outcome of this destructive testing will be maximized and the relevant data will be recorded for post analysis.
Jialin Tang gave a presentation to review the project progress with the consortium. The end date of the BLADESAVE project is November 30, 2019. There are six deliverables to submit before the end date. Jialin Tang and Simona Schrammel suggested that the consortium allows a one-month review time / a review time of one month before the submission.
The BLADESAVE system has been installed on EWT’s turbine since November 2018. Elena Saldeva and Lukas Hunter gave an overview of the issues encountered after the system was installed in a operational environment. The issues included SmartSonic system laser failure, CUDA crashing and AE processing software errors and these issues delayed the start of the system demonstration until January 2019. During the system demonstration, additional issues arose, so Smart Fibres, ASSIST and TWI were designated by the consortium to lead the mitigation of those issues.
Stefan de Groot presented the details of the full blade destructive testing plan, including costs and the timeframe available for testing. Strategies to maximize the testing outcome in the given timeframe were also discussed. Given the short time frame of one week, Jialin and Benn proposed inducing a small crack in the blades before starting the test to accelerate the damage growth. The types of damages to be monitored are leading edge cracking and shell cracking, and the focus will be on using the AE functionality to detect the damage, with the possibility of also testing the second damage detecting mechanism if there is time.
Benn Faulkner gave a presentation on the business activities carried out, the status of signing distribution agreements for the BLADESAVE product and the upcoming event (Husum Wind, 2019 conference) at which Benn and Jialin will be present to promote the product. Renewable Advice and Assist were designated to prepare all the marketing materials (presentation video, logos, posters, flyers and brochures) needed to promote the product.
As usual, at the end of the day, Simona Schrammel presented the financial status of the project and the consortium agreed for the next consortium meeting to take place on August 20-21, 2019, either hosted by Renewable Advice or in Brussels.
