The problem with reports

An inspection report is written to close out a job. It says what the inspector saw on the day, in the inspector's words, with the inspector's severity scale. It is a good record of one visit and a poor basis for a decision, for four reasons:

  • It is a document, not data. A finding on page 14 of a PDF cannot be queried, sorted, compared or counted across the fleet.
  • It has no position. "Trailing edge, mid-blade" cannot be revisited. The next inspector will photograph a different spot and call it new.
  • Its severity is local. One supplier's "category 3" is another's "medium". Neither says whether the defect has changed since last year.
  • It leaves with the supplier. The photographs and the raw footage often stay on the supplier's system. When the contract ends, so does the history.

The decisions an owner has to make, which blades to repair this year, which to monitor, which to claim against the manufacturer before the warranty ends, and which to leave alone, are all comparisons. Comparisons need data with a position and a history.

What the software has to do

One record per finding, with a position

The unit of blade condition is the finding: one defect, on one blade, at one position, with one severity, at one date. Every photograph and every frame of video hangs off a finding, not the other way around. Position means distance from the root and location in the section, so the same finding can be found again. Fenestra does this with a 360° viewer that carries a distance readout on every frame, so a flag placed on a frame is a flag placed on the blade.

History over time

The question that matters is whether a finding has changed. That needs the same finding, at the same position, recorded at two or more dates, with the images side by side. A defect that has not grown in three years is a monitoring item. One that has doubled is a repair. Software that stores findings as independent reports cannot answer this; software that stores them as a history can.

A severity scale that means the same thing everywhere

Severity has to be one scale across the fleet, applied the same way by every inspector and every supplier, or the fleet view is meaningless. The scale should be the industry's, not the software vendor's, and it should be attached to the finding, so that reclassifying a finding after review changes one record and every report that draws on it.

Every supplier's history in one place

An owner cannot start from zero every time a supplier changes. Older reports have to come in. Fenestra imports supplier PDF reports with AI assistance, so an inspection from five years ago sits next to this year's crawler recording as findings on the same blade rather than as a document in a different folder.

Human review, with help

Reviewing hours of blade interior recordings is slow, and it is the step most likely to be rushed. AI can propose candidates: places in the recording that look like a bond-line crack, a wrinkle, a water stain. What it must not do is put a finding into a report on its own. In Fenestra, every AI-proposed candidate is confirmed, rejected or reclassified by an inspector before it enters a report. The inspector's judgement stays in the loop, and the record of who decided what is kept.

Reports generated from the data, not the other way round

The report is an output. When findings are the record, a branded report in Word or PDF, with a 360° walkthrough appendix and CSV summaries, is generated from them, and the same findings feed the fleet view, the repair plan and the warranty file. Nobody retypes a table.

Repair plans attached to findings

A repair plan is a decision about a finding. Attaching it to the finding, with a status, closes the loop: what was found, what was decided, what was done, and what the next inspection showed.

The owner keeps the data

Condition data is an asset that has to outlive contractors and software vendors. Fenestra stores the recordings, findings and reports in the customer's own SharePoint, hosted in the EU, with multi-factor authentication. If the relationship ends, the history stays with the owner.

Asset condition intelligence, defined

With those pieces in place, asset condition intelligence stops being a slogan and becomes a set of questions the owner can answer from the data:

  • Which blades in the fleet have findings above a given severity, and how many are growing?
  • Which blade type or manufacturing batch has the most bond-line findings? Is it a serial defect?
  • Which findings on which turbines need to be documented before the warranty ends next year?
  • Which turbines had a lightning strike and have not had the conductor inspected since?
  • Where did the repairs done two years ago hold, and where did they not?

None of these questions can be answered from a folder of reports. All of them can be answered from findings with positions and histories.

Where the data comes from

Software is only as good as the record it holds, and the record for the inside of a blade has been thin: a few photographs from the root, taken by someone in a confined space. A crawler changes that. Detectra produces a distance-tagged 8K 360° recording of up to 80 % of the blade length in about 15 minutes per blade, so the finding has a position and the next inspection has a baseline. What an internal blade inspection covers explains what that record contains. For an owner, the software and the recording are two halves of the same thing: one produces evidence with a position, the other keeps it and makes it comparable.

Frequently asked questions

What is blade asset management software?

Software that stores the condition of every blade in a fleet as findings, each with a position, a severity, a date and its images, and tracks them across inspections and suppliers. It generates reports from that record rather than storing reports as the record.

What does asset condition intelligence mean for wind turbine blades?

Being able to answer fleet-level questions from inspection data: which findings are growing, which blade types have a pattern, what needs documenting before a warranty ends, and where repairs held. It requires findings with positions and histories, not a folder of reports.

Who owns the inspection data?

It should be the asset owner. Fenestra stores recordings, findings and reports in the customer's own SharePoint, hosted in the EU, so the history remains with the owner regardless of which supplier or software is used later.