Project description
Drone repairs of wind turbine blades eliminate rope-hanging manual repairs
Wind turbine blades suffer from repetitive maintenance issues. Repairs are currently done manually by specialised rope-access workers, which is a costly and slow process. In addition, there is a lack of manpower, which is projected to grow to a shortage of 150 000 repair technicians. Funded by the European Innovation Council, the flying factory project will support Danish start-up Reblade's drone-based solution for the automated repair of wind turbine blades. The innovative solution will lower the levelised cost of wind energy, offering a 90 % reduction in turbine downtime during leading edge erosion repairs. Reblade's repair drone is usable by non-specialised workers. Moreover, it will reduce the current 4,5 days for manual repairs down to just 4,5 hours, and reduce CO2 by 2.4 million tonnes by 2031 and up to 12.6 million tonnes by 2040.
Objective
All existing repair solutions use a vertically positioned blade due to rope-hanging robots or workers. The proposed solution for fast repairs of leading edge erosion is based on a first-ever approach, where a drone lands on a horisontally positioned blade. This approach eliminates both the time-consuming rope-access requirement and associated fall risks from manual repairs entirely. Being able to apply the new generation of leading edge protection, will catapult the present state-of-the-art of blade protection, enabling upgraded blades to generate energy with 10% higher output and efficiency. In addition, the application of leading edge protection by our technology, will yield an automatic, fast, uniform, controlled, and documented quality, which has been well received by key market partners in demonstrations. Our drone is targeted to repair at higher wind speeds than is realistic with existing market solutions, and is well-suited for both existing and future wind turbines.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.3.1 - The European Innovation Council (EIC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-EIC-ACC-BF - HORIZON EIC Accelerator Blended FinanceCoordinator
8544 MOERKE
Denmark
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.