Nordex Turns to Drones for Wind Turbine Hybrid Maintenance Approach

A big trend in the manufacturing space for the last twenty years has been Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) 3rd party services, such as remote oil and gas exploration, equipment monitoring and more.

Now, you can add drone monitoring of wind turbine blades to the list.

The wind turbine manufacturer, Nordex Group,  created a partnership with Lufthansa Aerial Services (LAS) last week to start offering unmanned aircraft systems— drones — to inspect installed wind turbines and help customers with more efficient maintenance approaches — a cross between predictive and preventive.

Rotor blades on wind turbines are regularly inspected by rope teams and they look for erosion defects due to wind, weather and stress.

According to Nordex, this [new service] provides additional possibilities for continuously monitoring the status of rotor blades using the very latest technology. While not explicitly an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) application, sensors should play a big part in this development.

LAS is a new division in the Lufthansa Group and belongs to Lufthansa Consulting GmbH. The company offers the commercial operation of drones and related data management for the inspection, measurement and monitoring of infrastructures. Wind energy is one of the industrial sectors on which LAS focuses.

“Apart from the close-up inspection of rotor blades, monitoring the progress of the construction of new wind farms is another area of application,” says Dr. Andreas Jahnke, Managing Director of Lufthansa Consulting GmbH.

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