SOCOBLADE Protects Against Leading Edge Erosion

Max Le Tallec from SOCOMORE speaks about their new SOCOBLADE product, in partnership with Hontek. The product was originally created to protect military helicopters, and is now an LEP solution that reduces downtime, maintenance costs, and power losses. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: Imagine spending half a million dollars on leading edge repairs only to watch them fail again in just 18 months. That's the reality many wind operators face today. This week on the Uptime Spotlight, Max Le Tallec joins us from Socomore to discuss how helicopter technology designed to withstand combat conditions is now protecting wind turbine blades. The wait for a military grade leading edge solution is finally over. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind Energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Max, welcome to the program. Maxime Le Tallec: Thank you. Thanks for welcoming me. Allen Hall: I think we're gonna talk leading edge erosion and what to do about it. I want to back up a little bit because there's a lot of operators with a lot of leading edge erosion. Why should they care about the leading edge erosion? Why does that matter? Maxime Le Tallec: The, we've seen the blade today been eroded, almost destroyed with holes of the size [00:01:00] of a fist which. Create issues on the aerodynamics of the blade and the downtime and major repairs or major downtimes on the blade. Allen Hall: Yeah. And that turns into a lot of expensive repairs, obviously. And we're also hearing from a lot of operators about the power. Loss of you hear numbers from anywhere from a fraction of a percent to somewhere north of three 4%. Are you hearing those same sort of things? Just the power loss gets to be so expensive. Maxime Le Tallec: Yes. And even up to five certain are saying so that's why you need to be preventive on this aspect and actually not to wait for the damage to come on the plate. Joel Saxum: I think that when we talk a EP loss, it's exacerbated even more in the market nowadays when we're starting to look at these 5.5, 6.1, 6.8, and I'm just talking about onshore turbines, these big megawatt turbines. If you're losing 1% from that big turbine, that's a lot more than it would've been, 10, 15 years ago on a GE 1.5, or you're not lo, you're [00:02:00] losing, but 1% doesn't hurt you as much. But when you start talking these big, long blades, like everybody has to have a leading edge, erosion,