GE Renewable Energy in partnership with the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has launched an automated turbine blade finishing programme, having completed successful trials.
The programme aims to improve throughput, environmental health and safety (EHS), and quality in wind turbine blade manufacturing.
Blade finishing includes trimming excess material after moulding and grinding blade surface to meet quality requirements.
The programme will leverage knowledge of advanced composite processing together with sensing, robotics and automation to develop low-cost solutions for wind blade finishing with potential to increase throughput by 30% and improve EHS in factories.
The team moved from concept to prototype, enabled by the capabilities at NREL’s Composites Manufacturing Education and Technology (CoMET) facilities, to perform quick proof of concept trials on blade sections.
The team was then able to collaborate with engineering, operations and EHS group at a LM Wind Power factory in Grand Forks, North Dakota, to perform successful trials on an actual wind turbine blade in production.
“GE Renewable Energy is excited about the outcome of pilot project and look forward to industrialising this technology,” said Arvind Rangarajan, technical leader automation for GE Renewable Energy.
“The NREL team enjoyed collaborating with our industry partners at GE to develop new ways to complete blade finishing operations,” said David Snowberg, technical project manager at NREL.
LM Wind Power Americas technology centre director James Martin said: “Automated wind turbine blade finishing program has been a critical catalyst for advancing ‘automation led design’ principles into LM Wind Power.
“The team has delivered an innovative solution to a problem that is common across many aspects of high throughput composite manufacturing, paving the way for safer, higher quality component trimming.
“We are currently progressing the next steps of factory trials and industrialisation, with the target of implementing in our North American manufacturing facilities in the next product and factory cycle.”