Arctura to Present at Wind Turbine Blades Conference

Lightning damage stubbornly remains a major O&M expense for owner-operators in cost and in frequency. Damage such as blade skin punctures, shell delamination, split trailing edges, and occasionally catastrophic damage are costly to repair and can cacause excessive downtime.

Most wind turbines come equipped with a lightning protection system, typically consisting of a set of metal disk receptors mounted flush to the surface of the blade and electrically connected to ground via a down conductor inside the blade. When the system works well during a strike, a leader from a receptor connects with a downward leader from the cloud, and the charge is safely transmitted to ground. However, the streamers that initiate inside the blade often win the race to connect with the lightning leader, resulting in punctures and other blade damage.

Arctura has teamed up with the leading coatings provider, Mankiewicz, to offer the new Alexit® BladeRep® ALP 20 topcoat with ArcGuide®. This revolutionary blade coating improves the effectiveness of the surface-mounted lightning receptors, making it more likely that lightning will attach safely to the existing lightning protection system and less likely that it will attach directly to the down conductor or other internal blade components.

Please join Arctura’s Lead Engineer, Chris Szlatenyi (pronounced “slat-nee”), at the Wind Turbine Blades conference in Boston on October 2, where he will be reviewing the genesis of the concept, the development and validation process, and he will review our ongoing wind farm field tests.