The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast
The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast
Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Joel Saxum & Phil Totaro
Blade Failure Alert: How ONYX Prevents Million-Dollar Disasters
31 minutes Posted May 15, 2025 at 6:03 am.
] show. Hello. How's it going? Thanks for letting us. Yeah, we're really interested to, to talk to you today just because there's so many blade root issues from pitch bearings and blade bushings or inserts as they're called sometimes, and a number of other issues. And when we talk to operators, what they tell us is, oh, we, you use ecoPITCH.
] really serendipitous thing that we, we had just developed this product and we could easily pivot.
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Show notes
ONYX Insight's ecoPITCH system prevents catastrophic wind turbine blade failures caused by pitch bearing issues. Forrest French and Martin McLarnon reveal how continuous monitoring and early detection can save wind farms millions.
Contact Martin McLarnon: martin.mclarnon@onyxinsight.com
Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
Allen Hall: ONYX Insight's ecoPITCH monitoring system has become crucial for wind farm operators facing blade root insert failures. These failures start invisibly but can end catastrophically with blades detaching completely. This week we speak with Forrest French Senior Project Engineer, and Martin McLarnon, sales Director for North America at ONYX Insight.
Their ecoPITCH system detects dangerous movements before visible signs appear as Forest notes in the interview. By the time you can get a feeler gauge measurement, it's probably too late. So join us to discover how data-driven monitoring is helping operators make smarter maintenance decisions preventing million dollar disasters and keeping turbines spinning safely.
Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.
Allen Hall: Martin and Forest. Welcome to the [
And they love that system. But I want to, I wanna back up first and talk about what are some of the operators experiencing out there in the field And ecoPITCH system was originally developed to look at pitch bearing problems and forests. What are some of those pitch bearing problems you're seeing out in the field today?
Forrest French: Yeah, so it, it, it's a funny story. It was originally developed for pitch bearing, uh, applications. Um, the industry as a whole started experiencing this root insert issue, so we were able to, we were kind of in a perfect position, right? It was, it was a, it was a [
To measure both the pitch bearing and this root insert issue. Uh, the, the pitch bearing issues are admittedly the, the more difficult, uh, issue, right? To measure. Um, there's, there's some,