PolyTech, Danish wind industry service provider, is expanding to meet market demands and to bring services closer to its customer base, by establishing a lightning test center in China.
The company’s first testing center outside Denmark will specialize in performance lightning tests and is expected to open at the Sheyang Port Economic Development Zone in Jiangsu in the second quarter of 2022.
Construction of the new testing center is scheduled to start in the first or second quarter of 2021 and the facility will be 150-meter long to fit the longest turbine blades on the market and have a 24-meter high ceiling to allow future larger nacelles to be tested.
All tests will be performed following the newest IEC standards and include lightning tests using extra-high-voltage and high-impulse currents to simulate all stages of a lightning strike. The center will also handle smaller tests on subsystems, parts, and components.
According to Mads Kirkegaard, PolyTech chief executive, the company’s Danish-based lightning test center is no longer the obvious choice when testing and certifying these new blade designs and LPS (lightning protection solutions) as wind turbine manufacturers across the world are prototyping many new blades in China. He adds, “with the increased complexity of lightning protection resulting from the transition to carbon, we want to ensure testing availability in the vicinity of the customers we are strategically partnering with regarding LPS. The Chinese test center is, therefore, a natural next step for us.”
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