“…I get paid to talk. I don’t have a law degree, I have a bachelor’s in kicking butt and taking names.” This is the opening line in the movie Thank you For Smoking.
One could say, this is parallel to my life. I don’t have a law degree, I have a bachelor’s degree and I, too, get paid to talk. But unlike in the movie, I work with 20 of the smartest PhDs, working on innovative cloud-based software technology – DigitalClone – to predict the actual life of new designs and fielded wind turbines to provide life extension solutions that drive down the cost of energy.
The movie goes on, and in one scene you hear the antagonist reading a newspaper article written about himself….“Nick Naylor lead spokesman for big tobacco would have you believe cigarettes are harmless, but really he’s doing it for the mortgage…”
You see, the wind industry suffers from addiction, too. It’s addicted to physical testing, and what the 20 PhDs on Sentient staff would tell you is that physical testing alone may be harmful to the health of your wind turbine fleet. So, I say, “Thank You for Physical Testing.”
Our software has calculated a 68% difference between physical testing and operational life. This is a great stat for Sentient Science, because it keeps our company in business, and talkers like me, employed.
Our operator customers turn to data analytics, materials science, physics and tribology to understand why they see a 6% failure rate in their fleet. Why, despite the physical test’s stamp of approval for 20-year design life, they continue to miss failures that are happening every day at their wind sites. Operators are perplexed because they can’t move past corrective maintenance to the coveted predictive health maintenance, despite “best” sensor technologies. Instead operators seek out companies like Sentient Science to proactively get ahead of their failures to prevent major downtime and costly correctives.
Sentient Science’s life extension platform simulates 1000s of computational tests every day to understand how the material characteristics of the drivetrain and subcomponents behave in the field, operating under their actual loading and operational conditions based on site location. This gives OEMs a clearer picture of how the wind turbines will perform during design phase, and then once operational, how those turbines are behaving in the field.
Our customer base uses DigitalClone technology to drive those failure rates down, incrementally and over time from 6% to 3%. In new designs, drive failure rates from the standard 6% to 1% in deployment. We do this through:
- Long-term life extension (lifeX) actions
- Buy on Life® replacement strategies
- “Super Hits” – finding 20% more assets running with damage that are not on the current CMS watchlist
- Inventory management and control that leverages the DigitalClone platform for economies of scale
- Engineering expertise to understand the root cause of critical failures
Later in the movie… Naylor is defending the use of cigarettes on a talk show. He’s sitting on the stage next to a young boy with cancer and states – “I hate to think and talk in such callous terms, but if anything, we’d be losing a customer (if the young boy with cancer dies). It’s not only our hope, it’s in our best interest to keep Robin alive and smoking.”
I’ll say the same to Wind Turbine OEMs… If anything, we’d be losing a customer should you move to computational testing + physical testing. It’s not only our hope, but it’s in our best interest that OEMs continue to just physical test so we can keep our customer base alive and needing software!
Thank You Wind Industry for Physical Testing. Keep us in business!!
If your addicted to Physical Testing and want help overcoming your challenges, please reach me directly at jszpylman@sentientscience.com or download a demo and someone from our team can walk you through how our software can help with your business initiatives.
This blog was written by Jill Szpylman, Director of Public & Investor Relations at Sentient Science.