Pro-Drone - Wind Turbine Blades Inspection Solution

PRO-DRONE

AUTOMATED WIND TURBINE INSPECTION

Energy utility companies spend significant part of their budget each year on inspecting power lines, wind turbines and other fixtures. With many of them located in hard to reach area, regular manual inspections are not only expensive, but time consuming and often hazardous.

Pro-Drone is an easy to use, highly accurate and safe to deploy, drone based inspection solution. Perfectly suited for wind turbine maintenance, Pro-Drone system comes with complete with drone aircraft equipped with LIDAR sensor, high resolution image camera and ground station and tuned flight algorithms software, all tuned to allow the drones to fly at precise point to effectively monitor each turbine. Images are captured with sub-milimetre precision and managed with a help of advanced software.

The renewable energy market is rapidly expanding, but operating costs remain a challenge for the industry. More efficient monitoring and maintenance quickly becomes the only way for the sector to remain competitive.

SMART TECHNOLOGY

Pro-Drone proprietary control, featuring space awareness sensors, enables the UAV to fly in relation to the blade making precise sweeps and collecting the data automatically. This makes the process much more robust, repeatable and safe when compared to other UAV inspections and up to 6 times more economical than traditional rope access inspections.

The technology allows companies to conduct a full inspection of a wind turbine in 30 - 45 minutes. This has the clear advantage of ensuring the turbines don’t need to be out of action for long.

Upon completion of flight mission, the data collected by drone is then fed into a cloud-based platform where the data and images from the inspections are provided for inspectors to analyse the results easily and intuitively.

FEATURES

Pro-Drone integrated solution has two key technological components: customised control that enables the UAV to have positional awareness in relation to the wind blade and purpose selected payload.

CONTROL

Pro-Drone proprietary control feature provides the relative position of the UAV to the blade. This enables the UAV to know where, and how close, it is to the blade. Complementing this information with other onboard sensors the UAV always keeps a safe distance from the blade and follows a much more stable and robust path. Importantly this makes the blade inspection a semi-autonomous and robust procedure as it is no longer dependent on pilot expertise and ensures that the UAV does not collide with the blade. This offers unparalleled reliability and operational safety.

CUSTOM PAYLOAD

Pro-Drone has selected and integrated a custom payload optimised for the specificities of inspecting a blade. Visual inspections are carried out using an industrial camera to deliver millimetre precision on the blade. Thermal inspections, either induced or passive, will also be integrated and offered as an optional upgrade in the future.

BLADE LOCK

Proprietary control of wind turbine blades lock provides smooth and consistent images.

IMAGE ENHANCEMENT

Filters and camera settings are tuned to register the best detail from blade surface.

SAFETY

Distance control ensures that drone separation from wind turbine blade is always safe.

IMAGE DATABASE

Images are stored in an easily accessible archive always available in the cloud.

PRECISION

Sub-millimetre precision to identify fractures and erosion.

REPORTING TOOL

Inspection process and results are fully documented for preventative action to be taken or future reference.