As wind turbine blades get bigger, they are increasingly being worn down by weather and by the airborne particles they encounter as they spin at up to 350 km/hour. Producers and owners of wind turbines have been looking for a solution.
After three years of development work, the Danish company PolyTech A/S has launched a new technology – Leading Edge Protection (LEP) – that addresses the wind turbine industry’s need to protect blades against rain and particle erosion. The product has been tested on offshore wind turbines in the North Sea area for more than a year, and test results are very promising.
“The need to protect wind turbine blades against rain and other impact effects has been known in the industry for decades. It has escalated as wind turbines have gotten bigger and we’ve collected operational experience that has documented the extent of the problem. Since the wind turbine industry is our largest customer group, Polytech has used our knowledge of materials and production practices and put a large amount of our development resources into finding a solution. With our LEP technology we’ve developed polymers with special qualities that can withstand the aggressive environment that wind turbines placed off shore and most on shore environments are exposed to,” says CEO Mads Kirkegaard of PolyTech A/S.
