Autonomous wind turbine blades cleaning system

Abstract

Wind Turbine Blade cleaning is essential to remove the contamination buildup on the blades, which otherwise deforms the shape of the airfoil and reduces the power production by 20%–30%. The contamination is mainly due to soil deposit, filth, bat carcasses and dead bugs deposits, on turbine blades. There are no efficient and automatic ways for cleaning the blades. This paper presents an Autonomous Wind Turbine Blades Cleaning System (ABC) designed to address the issue in entirely an automatic way. The proposed system is autonomous and “smart” in that it can: self-schedule the cleaning roster considering specifically the local atmospheric conditions as well as utility's system demand dynamics, commence the cleaning operation autonomously, with no human interaction at all, executes the post-cleaning log and informs the operation center in a routine manner, and alerts the Operations Center in case immediate attention is needed. The proposed system is physically installed onto the turbine tower and programmed to operate according to the industries best practices established in the field so far.