Wind Power LAB's blade expert Morten Handberg explains a critical wind industry problem: new turbine blades are failing years too early. These massive blades - now stretching over 100 meters - are experiencing unexpected structural damage due to complex aerodynamic forces. Handberg shares Wind Power LAB's essential strategies for detecting and preventing these costly blade failures before they shut down your turbines.

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Allen Hall: As wind turbines reach unprecedented heights and blade lengths stretch beyond 100 meters, unexpected challenges are emerging from the field. This week we welcome back Morten Handberg. The renowned Blade Whisperer from Wind Power LAB. In this eye-opening discussion, Morten reveals why modern blade designs are showing structural issues earlier than expected and what operators need to watch for to protect their turbines.

Stay tuned.

Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind Energy's brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow.

Allen Hall: Morten, welcome back to the show.

Morten Handberg: Thanks, Allen. It's great to be, be back again.

Allen Hall: You are one of our most popular guests. You are the Blade Whisperer. And any time I'm at a trade show, people ask, how's Morten doing? How's the Blade Whisperer doing? Like, well, Morten's great. Morten's super busy, but Morten is great.

And they want to have you back on. So here we are. We're back on again. And. The topic of today's discussion is about aerodynamic stresses that happen to blades, and we're seeing more problems with that than some of the quality issues. I think it's a combination of quality and aerodynamic issues. What is happening in the field right now with aerodynamic loading on some of these new, longer, more flexible blades?

Morten Handberg: Well, it's, it's something that's been been happening over time. So if we look 10, 15 years back, then the blades were of course shorter. The and they were a lot stiffer than they were today. They were heavily reinforced and you could say maybe they were. They were under optimized that they had a lot more load capacity and that were then what they needed.

And, and in, in process of the, in, in, as the blades have been become longer than the, then that buffer have gone away, so, because the, in order to build a logger blade, you had to reduce the the, the thickness of your laminates to avoid an overly, you know, bulky structure, but something that could harness the wind in a more efficient way So that leads to slender, thinner blades that are a lot softer.

And we can see that in the natural frequency that the, that the flap wise and edge wise frequencies, they have kind of gone down. And that's because the blades become softer. And that also means that the way that the blade behaves with the wind direction means that the gravity loads are still a major, a major component, but Aeroelastic loading, which adds to shear and torsion loads, have become much more prominent loading conditions on the blades that we see today.

Allen Hall: That's interesting. Yeah, obviously the blades are lighter than they ever been for the length. I remember being at DTU a year or so ago and looking at one of the first offshore wind blades that Vestas had made,