MAINTENANCE OF WIND TURBINES IS DONE BY DRONE

**Due to the weather conditions in the places where the wind power plants are located, the blades of the turbines cannot be inspected adequately and regularly. Due to the fact that none of the maintenance and repair works that need to be done during the inspection and then are implemented, the energy production efficiency of the turbines whose operating life decreases. Ülke Enerji, which provides inspection, maintenance, repair and retrofit services for wind power plants in and around Turkey,**autonomously applies fast and safe inspection to wind turbine blades thanks to its 3DX™ platform using d rone technology.   Traditional methods applied in wind turbine maintenance processes, which are very laborious at every stage from planning to implementation, reporting and improvement, give very high error rates despite the time and cost loss they create. The blades, which become dysfunctional due to reasons such as not being able to collect sufficient and healthy data and at the same time not being able to intervene correctly in damaged turbines, can lead to even wind turbines becoming dysfunctional in a short time. Ülke Enerji, which adapts the latest technology to wind turbine blade maintenance, is able to perform complete operation on wind turbines even in height and difficult winter conditions thanks to the 3DX™ inspection platform it offers. This platform, where thousands of wings can be monitored through a single interface, ensures that many measures related to the wings are taken in the shortest time and in the most effective way, while determining the repair needs at the optimum time and ensuring that they are repaired economically.  ****Wind Turbine Blade Maintenance Makes a Difference with Drone Technology Until now, wind turbine control and supervision systems did not have customisable features that could adapt to the needs of users and various scenarios. Stating that they have adapted the most efficient and reliable method to wind turbine maintenance, Ülke Enerji General Manager Ali Aydın explains how the 3DX™ inspection platform, where they benefit from drone technology, creates benefits.

1. Efficiency: In the wind turbine blade maintenance process, first of all, autonomous flight is carried out by making field planning, then the collected data is examined and reported by the blade experts and stored in the cloud system.

The 3DX™ inspection platform enables a comprehensive inspection of the wind turbine to be completed within 1 hour. In this way, turbine downtime is minimized and maximum energy production is supported. In the system where an average of 700 photographs are obtained, 3 wings are inspected during this time.  ****Reliability: This new technology, which leaves no blind spots with 100% scanning of wind turbine blades from 6 different angles, detects even the smallest damages with the high-resolution visuals it collects. On the platform where artificial intelligence support and drone technology come together, 3DX™ creates an accurate, fast and autonomous assessment of the damages on the wings, and ranks the detected defects according to the damage priority status. Thus, the platform, which provides data on turbine blades on where to start the repair phase and the degree of damage, creates a database full of reliable information for comparison and trend analysis, with data suitable for action. Keeping the database in cloud services also ensures the security and fast availability of the data.