Offshore Repair Platform, Adjustable Rotor Shaft, Glowing Tires

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

This week we discuss Flender's adjustable rotor shaft assembly, designed to mitigate gear misalignment issues. Then Dolfines' innovative solution for onsite repairs of floating wind platforms using a telescoping crane. Finally, we highlight Goodyear's fun and practical glow-in-the-dark tires, which can help locate your vehicle in the dark and add a unique aesthetic touch. 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. All right, our first idea of the week is an adjustable rotor shaft assembly for wind turbines. And as we know, there's all kinds of issues with anything rotating equipment on a wind turbine. Particularly if it involves gears and teeth. Well, this idea from Flender describes an adjustable rotor shaft assembly for connecting a gearbox to the generator. And the key feature is it uses a curved tooth coupling with the releasable support element which allows the both ends to move relative to one another, which And a lot of wind turbines, if you've been up in them, there is a lot of movement at times, and it lets that misalignment not destroy. The assembly. And this is really slick because we have all kinds of issues, like I've said, on anything with teeth, on, on some of these bigger wind turbines as the, the blades get bigger and they get taller and everything's moving around. Phil, this makes a lot of sense. I'd be surprised if Flinders not using this already though. Philip Totaro: Yes, I would hope so. We haven't been able to confirm it, but presumably for the turbines with larger capacity gearboxes for the, the larger onshore machines and maybe even some of the offshore ones. I would hope that this technology is being utilized because it will absolutely help make a difference in kind of bending moment and gear misalignment issues which can create a lot of maintenance work for, for the turbines. While the services folks may not be happy about it because they might be losing some, losing some revenue opportunities the owners and operators absolutely would love this kind of technology to be implemented because it's it's going to allow for a gearbox to be able to, to be operated in a slightly wider loads window which is also kind of an interesting application to this because, even in a market like the U. S. where we know that a lot of owners and operators are, are kind of PTC farming. They're not just wind farming. And what that means is they want to be able to extract as much out of the turbine as they can. for the first 10 years of, of an asset life. A technology like this might actually be helpful in making sure that the gearbox lasts the full 10 years before you see any kind of major drop off in performance. So any technology where you can accommodate this kind of gear misalignment is going to be a good one for owners and operators and, and the gearbox manufacturers themselves. Joel Saxum: Yeah, I mean, if you have a small rigid component then you can have a fixed gear, fixed location. It's easy to keep it in line where you don't have a whole lot of crazy loads on it. But like, Allen was saying at the beginning of the section here, when you're bent,