| In the Airtub project Dutch universities and manufacturers jointly develop an innovative system for remote inspection and maintenance of wind turbines at sea. The HZ University of Applied Sciences is responsible for the development of an inspection crawler.
The crawler is a robot for examining turbine blades with all kinds of sensors. It is dropped by a drone, can move remote controlled over the turbine blades and will be picked up by a drone again!
We are looking for enthusiastic students to join the Airtub Design team. Please read the testimonials of two teams who made valuable contribution to the project.
“Our research mainly focuses on improving the accuracy of the crawler navigation and location system. Be sure the maintenance engineers need to know the exact position of the crawler and the defects on the blade. More effective indoor usage is also taken into our account for testing and training purposes.
We aim and we will manage to get a 5cm location accuracy with our GPS system and other auxiliary location systems. The final product can show the longitude and latitude of crawler, velocity, moving direction and also moving distance. So every defect spot on the blade will be localized by our system!”
Jiacong Li of Team 2.1
“The topic of our group is to make sure the crawler will not drop off the blade during inspection. And that is a challenge! In heavy winds on strong bended turbine blades the crawler must stick itself to the surface. So we design a strong suction system.
First we analyzed the relationship between adhesive suction strength, energy consumption, the shaping of the suction nozzle and surface texture. For this we developed a mathematical model in Excel for optimizing the design of the suction device. Now we are designing a high suction – low energy suction nozzle which will be 3D printed and tested by us and then compared with the theoretical model.”
Gefei Zhu of Team 2.2
Will you join us? We have many more interesting mechatronic research and design assignments for you! | 
