Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Aerones Robots Scale LEP Repairs Across the US

Dainis Kruze and Janis Putrams, co-founders of Aerones, welcome Allen to their new Denton, Texas facility to discuss robotic spray-coat LEP repairs, third-generation internal blade crawlers, and their US-made inspection drone that eliminates Chinese components.

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

Allen Hall: Dainis and Janis, welcome back to the program.

Dainis Kruze: Thank you, Alan, for visiting us, uh, in, in our new facility.

Allen Hall: Yeah. Is a great new facility. We’re in Denton, Texas, which is just north of Dallas. Uh, and you move from. Lake Dallas area. Mm-hmm. And we had visited that facility a year or so ago. This new facility is amazing.

It’s what, probably four times the size. Yeah. Maybe a little bit bigger. And it is, uh, indicative of the growing business that Aeros has in the United States. And that’s wonderful. Uh, and I’m glad I could catch you in Texas ’cause I know you, you guys are running around the world all the time. Uh, I think the last time I was at.

A facility with both of you was over in Riga?

Dainis Kruze: Yes.

Allen Hall: Uh, probably two years ago now. Oh,

Dainis Kruze: yeah.

Allen Hall: So I saw the Riga operation and, and now we’re seeing [00:01:00]the, the Denton US operation. You have facilities in other places too, right?

Dainis Kruze: A small one in Australia, but, but yeah, the main facilities in Riga and the second biggest one here in, in Dallas.

Allen Hall: A lot of technology changes since Rose Riga. Uh. Leading edge being the big one, leading edge protection materials. And when I talk to US operators, even operators in Australia, we’re just there. They love the idea and the application of a robot for leading edge repairs.

Dainis Kruze: Oh yeah,

Allen Hall: it makes total sense. It’s one of those areas that, uh, Rons has shown you can do this with a robot much more consistently.

Has that business grown quite a bit since you first started it?

Dainis Kruze: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. We did more than 500 turbines last year, so we. The plan for this season is about one and a half thousand turbines, so it is growing quite a lot.

Allen Hall: So the, the speed and the quantity of robots here in the United States is must have grown considerably.

Dainis Kruze: Oh, yeah. Uh, one team now gets [00:02:00] up to 15 turbines a month. So if it’s category one or two turbine, uh, leading edge, uh, erosion, it’s about one day to do one turbine category three. Uh, one turbine is being done in two days, and we are talking about like 12 meter repair. It’s not a spot repair, it’s a full repair, like

Allen Hall: full repair.

Okay.

Dainis Kruze: Yeah.

Allen Hall: And the robot technology and the, the amount of technology on the robot is behind us has grown quite a bit. Uh oh. Yeah. You’re learning as you’re going. Obviously. I looked at a number of robots in at the Denton facility. Smarter robots. More data, more consistency. Particularly because the leading edge protection materials require a lot more care than rope technicians can generally create on site.

Right. Walk us through what this robot is doing, why it’s doing what it’s doing, and, and like the, the quality you get coming out of it. ’cause what I see behind me is really nice. Better than, than [00:03:00] what I’ve seen typically coming out of a factory.

Janis Putrams: Yeah. So multiple things actually we’ve been. Kind of what we’ve been hearing sometimes is that, um, that material’s good, the application seems good, but then it comes off after some time and you don’t understand what’s what happened, right?

Yeah. So we understood to, to make it right. We need to make sure that both the kind of, we take the full ownership for the, for the whole process, for the application. And so we’ve been investing quite a lot in our lab to, to actually understand what the material needs, how the surface needs to be, be prepared.

How do we measure it? How do we make sure the process is right? So actually what we saw is that, yeah, making sure adhesion, uh, is, is right, is is very important part. Also, when you go out there, there’s a quite a spectrum of the weather forecast, like information. You have humidity, you have temperatures, and you need to be able to guarantee the, the, yeah, the output in all of that spectrum.

So yeah, we’ve done quite a lot on, [00:04:00] uh, on those. And

Allen Hall: so from a technology perspective, you’re incorporating all those measurements actually into the robot. So you know what the temperature was when the application was made, you know what the humidity was, you know what the mixture was exactly. Remember the temperature of the, the ingredients that went into make the, the LEP material.

That’s remarkable. And now it’s, uh, I think a lot of people think of LEP as being something you would apply with a, you see it still, you see it with rollers and sort of. Basic human tools. You’re spray coating today. Yes.

Janis Putrams: Yes.

Allen Hall: And the, the smoothness of that coating is remarkable.

Janis Putrams: Yeah. For example, I dunno if you, if you know in factories where the cars are made Yeah.

You don’t see people rolling the car. Yeah. So, because the, the spraying technology, it enables us to actually guarantee the robot when it moves, it moves in a constant speed. It’s not manually, it’s kind of on a cruise control. So it’s, it’s moving in a constant speed [00:05:00] and the spraying is constant. And so yeah, the, the thickness is, is, is always the same.

And also it kind of nicely tempers off on the, on the sides. So there’s no vortexes, kind of, no aerodynamics loss. Uh, so yeah, it, it comes out very, very nice and

well.

Allen Hall: That’s the thing about when you put a leading edge coating on, a lot of times there’s a taped edge or a hard edge there. And then they gotta come back and try to fill it.

Or maybe they don’t fill it and the filler doesn’t stay. It may. I’ve seen all varieties of that. So when you spray coat it, not only do you get a very smooth finish, aerodynamically, you lose the step on the backside. Right. So the, the entire assembly is, is just more aerodynamic. And that’s the reason you’re doing in the first place.

Mm-hmm. It’s not just we’re recovering this shape. Yes, you’re recovering the shape, but you’d like to get some more power outta your, your turbines. That makes sense to me. When you’re, uh, cleaning the blade too. There’s a lot of technology about just getting the blade prepped because we’ve seen so many times where a leading edge coating’s been applied to a very [00:06:00] poorly prepped blade surface, and it just doesn’t stick.

A year later, you’re out doing it again. Describe what you’re doing on the prep side.

Janis Putrams: Yeah, so what we also see, uh, saw that, um, if there’s some damaged material, it’s very i...