We interview with Cory Mittleider of Malloy Wind, a company specializing in providing bearing solutions for wind turbine applications. Cory shares insights into common pitch bearing failure modes, how Malloy Wind analyzes failed bearings to develop improved designs, and the importance of factors like grease and manufacturing processes in bearing longevity. Visit https://www.malloywind.com/ for more info!

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Allen Hall: Welcome to the special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, and I'm here with my co host, Joel Saxum. If you were an owner, operator, or technician in wind, you have come across pitch bearing problems. And those pitch bearing problems can get really hard to detect early. But once you see them, they're expensive to repair.

So Joel and I thought it was time to bring on an expert. In bearings to the podcast. So our guest today is Cory Mittleider of Malloy Wind. And Cory has an extensive background in wind bearings. Now, Malloy, if you're not familiar, is based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which is in the middle of the United States.

And Malloy Wind specializes in providing solutions for wind turbine. applications. So they're a total wind focus organization. They offer a variety of services, including upgrading gearbox bearings, blade bearings, main shaft bearings, pitch motor renewals, and generator bearings. Cory, welcome to the program.

Cory Mittleider: Hey guys, thanks for having me.

Allen Hall: So there's so many questions about pitch bearings and just having been down in San Diego at the ACP OMNS one of the complaints is, Oh, I got a huge bearing replacement program going on this summer. And my first thought was of you were thinking, wow, you guys must be really busy because Bearings are probably after lightning, it's lightning and then bearings were one and two of the problems for wind turbines at the moment.

Cory Mittleider: Yeah, it's been it's been a busy couple of years. There's certainly standout platforms that are having their own platform specific failure modes that we're discovering as we work with operators.

Joel Saxum: Yeah we talked a little bit off air about some of that thing. Okay, so we're in lightning space.

We know if someone calls and says, I have this turbine with these blades, you go, Ooh, you got problems. So I know that it's the same thing in the Bering world, generators, like you know the ones that are going to happen. So when you guys initially talk with someone, What are some of the points that you asked them right away?

Okay. They've called, what are we looking at?

Cory Mittleider: Sure. Sure. So to your point, it's a lot of platform specific. We know platform X has this history of problems. Platform Y has a different set of history and platform Z is a pretty stable, pretty robust platform, for example. So we start to, to investigate, is it one of those platforms that we already know has some issues that we either maybe have something developed for, or are currently working on.

We talk about how soon are they experiencing their first failures or how are they detecting them? And most importantly, I think is how long do they plan to run the site? Are they two thirds of the way through the life of the site? Then, we probably propose a different solution to them than we do to some of the worst case scenarios where they're having failures in the three year ...