Creaform technology at the service of environmental sustainability

Environmental topics and issues are becoming more present, both in the day-to-day life and in the industrial realm. Increasing efforts are being made towards a “green shift,” whether for new technologies or optimizations made to existing ones. The project we carried out at the National Wind Technology Center (NWTC) in the US is a good example of that new paradigm. Siemens, one of the world’s largest providers of products, solutions and services in the energy technology field, asked us to complete a quite unique mandate.

The project

This project consisted in scanning sections of the blade from a wind turbine, which was about 53 meters long. We additionally had to scan the position of 250 sensors measuring pressure and speed, distributed all along the blade. Data from this project was used for Computational Fluid Dynamics purposes. We used the MetraSCAN 3D, in order to obtain the 3D image from the blade sections, and the HandyPROBE, in order to obtain the sensor’s 3D position.

The challenges

The mandate came with several challenges, which our teams of technical experts all very efficiently solved.

Scanning a large-scale object such as this one requires several steps, including the creation of a precise referential. Using a laser tracker was necessary for this project, in order to link both sides of the blade and maintain sufficient precision across the 53 meters. To do so, we distributed reference points (nests) on the part and recorded their position with the tracker. Then, we placed reflective targets on the nests, viewed by the C-Track, and we imported the .txt file including the center position of the tracker in VXelements. The software recognizes these positions, and our scans are then automatically linked into a global reference, offering the accuracy of the laser tracker.

The need for renewable energy is ever increasing, and we hope to work on many other such projects. This way, Creaform will be able to contribute to a larger environmental effort, and help engineers and designers to create and manufacture more efficient green equipment.