Wind turbine inspection team hang tough

It was no job for the faint hearted when a group of inspectors abseiled the wind turbines at Albany Wind Farm last week to inspect the 34m blades.

The blades are inspected individually by two specialists at a time, one on the compression and one on the tension side, while a third inspects a portion on the inside of the wind turbine.

The rotor gets rotated three times to enable the workers to inspect all three in the down orientation.

Principal engineer and blade specialist from Jacobs, Chris Buller, said they rotated personnel through each blade to manage fatigue caused by having to physically climb the towers because the service lifts were being upgraded.

It was the first rope-access inspection at Albany’s Grasmere Wind Farm.

Previous repairs were completed in 2011.

Mr Buller said his team, flown to Australia from New Zealand, had been carrying out wind turbine condition audits and assessments for more than eight years.

He said the team worked on an average of one wind turbine a day to “guesstimate” the work schedule with some redundancy for weather delays.

“Sometimes it can take 40 minutes, sometimes as much as two hours to inspect a blade,” he said.

The project requires Synergy and Enercon to provide information and safety support.

Mr Buller said the blades were eroded and damaged by rain, hail, salt, high winds, lightning, airborne particles and mechanical loading.

“Lightning can cause catastrophic failure of a wind turbine blade if there is no lightning protection system or the lightning system is compromised,” he said.

“Lightning can cause composite damage and super-heating of moisture within the blade, resulting in rapid expansion of steam within the blade, resulting in blade splitting.”