We discuss some of LM Wind Power's blade ideas, including a fiberglass fabric dispenser, flattened blade tips to reduce noise, and a blade window for their two-piece blades.

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This is Power Up, where groundbreaking wind energy ideas become your clean energy future. Here's your hosts, Allen Hall and Phil Totaro.

Allen Hall: Alright, Phil, some really interesting patents this week from our friends at LM. The first one is something you can relate to. You know, they say that necessity is the mother of invention, and that really the second saying about patents and ideas is probably one of the better places to come up with them is in the restroom.

Well, this Definitely happened because this patent involves putting Rolls of fiberglass fabric in a dispenser mechanism, just like an industrial toilet paper dispenser. That's what this is. So instead of having to carry those heavy rolls of fiberglass and put them onto the blade and basically lumbering them around, what they have is a basically a carriage system that holds multiple rolls and you pull from the roll.

And once the roll is empty, it rolls back into a basic containment device to hold the tubes that are left and a new roll. So all this is a really great device and it is pretty simple and I'm sure it saves the people on the floor a tremendous amount of time and energy. Come on, Phil, this one came out of the restroom, right?

I

Phil Totaro: can't speak to that, but what I can say is that the amount of manufacturing automation that we use in wind turbine blades is not what it needs to be. So this is a really good step in the right direction. In addition to being innovative and, and creative this is as you said, I mean, it's a huge time saver not to have to hand roll anything, and it, it allows for better layup when you're, you know, putting, putting different fabric layers down.

So, you know, keep in mind that for the majority of the industry, and this includes all the blades that we still manufacture over in China, of course, The majority of the industry is actually still using a lot of hand layup process and not a whole lot of process automation. So for LM to have recently developed this type of concept and this type of technology, it's a great application and certainly a necessary one.

I'm not quite sure if they developed it in the toilet, but You know, hopefully it's not in the waste bin either.

Allen Hall: Our second idea is from, of course, LM Wind Power, since this is their week. And this patent describes a innovative turbine blade design that significantly Reduces noise, but maintaining aerodynamic performance.

Now, the way this blade is designed, and it's mostly a shape, is the pressure side is broken into three distinct sections. A convex curve near the leading edge, a concave section in the middle, and a straight curve. section near the trailing edge. So it kind of goes flat. So if you've seen some more recent blades, they're kind of cupped, right?

And in that cupping, you create this little skipping action of the air at the back end, and it makes this rapidly changing noise that you hear on the ground. So what LM is doing is sort of flattening out the blades at the airflow coming off. Is it nearly as loud?