Edo Kuipers from We4Ce and Søren Kellenberger from CNC Onsite discuss their Re-FIT blade root repair solution, which has been successfully implemented at a wind farm in Southeast Asia. The solution allows operators to keep blades onsite while repairing critical blade root bushing failures.



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



Allen Hall: Ed0o and Soren, welcome to the program. 



Edo Kuipers: Thank you very much.



Thank you both.



Allen Hall: We have some really exciting news from you, from the field, but first I, I want to start with the problem, which. A lot of operators have right now, which is this blade root, bushing it in or insert issue, which is really critical to blades and you're the creator of the device that's gonna save a lot of blades.



You want to talk about what happens? When these blade root bushings fail? 



Edo Kuipers: Uh, yeah. What we have seen is that it especially concerns, um, uh, polyester type of blades. And what we see is that, um, bushings and, and, and composites, they are not attached to each other anymore. And after a [00:01:00] while, blades are simply flying off.



That's the, that's the whole, that's the whole problem. Of course. And now going back to the root cause, the root cause here is we are working with, with foes and. The fact is that if you're working with polyesters, they already have, um, at the, uh, uh, during the process, the curing process, they have already curing shrinkages.



So we have already curing shrinkages, which means we have already initial micro flagging going on, on the interface between the bushing and, and, and, and the limited around it. And that reduces, that reduces the um, surface. Carrying area. And by doing so, because we have less area, surface area that can transfer the loads from the hub, um, from the blades to the hub, eh, we have limited amount of, of years on running.



So we are reducing, uh, the, the amount of years [00:02:00] that the blades are on the, on the, on the turbine safely. 



Joel Saxum: This problem is compounding right now simply because there's a lot of the global wind turbine fleet that's starting to age. Right. Like we, we, we went through a big push in, you know, the early two thousands, 2000 tens,