Allen Hall speaks with Helicoid Industries' Dr. Lorenzo Mencattelli about their groundbreaking wind turbine blade LEP technology, which uses a biomimetic fiber pattern inspired by mantis shrimp. Their solution reduces erosion damage by 70% and can work with existing materials and manufacturing processes.

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Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.

Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Alan Hall, and today we're discussing one of the most persistent challenges in the wind energy industry, beating edge erosion on the wind turbine blades. To discuss an innovative solution to this problem, we're joined by Dr. Lorenzo Micatelli, the Managing Director of Tech and Ops at Helicoid Industries.

At Helicoid Industries, Lorenzo is spearheading the development of a groundbreaking technology that could significantly reduce leading edge erosion damage on wind turbine blades. Lorenzo. Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Lorenzo Mencattelli: Thank you very much, Allen for having me.

Allen Hall: So leading edge erosion is one of those top issues, and I first ran across your company at DTU, at the Leading Edge Erosion Conference, and all the experts all around the world were there.

I think it was in February or March earlier this year. And I sat through all the presentations and then Helichord came up and gave a presentation, and I was astounded because I hadn't seen anything like this technology before. But first I want to talk about how big of a problem this is, and I think during that DTU conference we realized it's a couple percentage points of power loss for a lot of operators, and it's structural damage when leading edge erosion penetrates through the shell of a winter blade.

That's a huge problem.

Lorenzo Mencattelli: Yeah, exactly. So the, the, the small percentage power loss is often acceptable if you want, because it doesn't really force the operator to, to stop the blade and, and perform maintenance and repair. But when the erosion gets to the composite substrate and therefore the structural integrity of the blade is compromised, then it carries a whole lot of other issues.

And, and then operations need to stop.

Allen Hall: Yeah, and that's where you see all the repair work going on, particularly in the United States, in the middle of the United States, where leading edge erosion has penetrated to the shell, and the amount of time and effort of independent people. service providers going and fixing blades, leading edge erosion is a, is an industry upon its own.

And it's a little shocking actually that your technology hasn't been used yet. I want to just describe it here in a second because the, right now in order to prevent leading edge erosion out of the OEMs, the manufacturer's equipment, you have to apply Plastic, basically plastic shells or rubberized plastic shells or put some sort of thick coating on to the blades, which is somewhat effective.

I would say it's going to give you a couple of years of life, but there really hasn't been a true fix.

Lorenzo Mencattelli: Yeah, so the, the focus indeed has been mainly on developing new solutions for the coating, right? That is applied on the, on the leading edge,