Cyberhawk Innovations, a global provider of aerial inspections and surveying using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), has launched a service specifically for inspecting both onshore and offshore wind turbines.
The solution combines the company's UAV field crews, inspection center, defect measurement technique and cloud-based asset-management software (iHAWK).
According to Cyberhawk, the drone service improves worker safety by minimizing the need to climb up the tower, increases inspection speed by three or four times in comparison to rope-access methods, and delivers results in both an industry-standard format and through iHAWK.
The iHAWK wind software enables clients to see the status of an entire wind farm at a glance and to drill into the photographic evidence behind each defect classification. The software also enables users to select findings from a schematic view of the blade and to intuitively view all images, including those that do not show defects. This approach ensures that a full record of each asset is available and facilitates year-on-year comparison, says Cyberhawk.
The company – which is headquartered in Livingston, Scotland, and has bases in the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia – operates in the utilities, oil and gas, renewables, and rail sectors. Cyberhawk says it has completed more than 10,000 commercial flights and more than 2,000 structural inspections, including for renewables clients such as RWE, SSE, Siemens, Vestas, Forewind, EDP, Repsol and DONG.
"Although we've been able to get great images of turbine blades for several years, the game-changer this year is the deployment of our iHAWK wind software and new field techniques, which enable us to accurately size defects and locate them on the blade from root and leading edge," explains Craig Roberts, CEO of Cyberhawk.
