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Headline: Wind Turbine Cleaning Drone Could Soon Fight Fires

Caption: A company has developed a sky-high way of extending the life of giant wind turbines - by maintaining them with special drones. Latvian company Aerones say their drone has the ability to wash, wax, paint or defrost turbine blades up to 400m high. It could also be used to fight fires. The company explain: "A lot of factors could provoke the airfoil break of the blades: snow, ice, pollution, humidity, dust, insects, etc. It is known that a good maintenance of wind turbines and, specially, of the blades can increase the efficiency as much as 20% or even as much as 100% in case of frost or snow on its blades." Able to reach 100m in two minutes, the drone is fitted with two hoses: one for electric power to allow unlimited flight time, and one for the water supply, or other agent. It can even clean wind generators at seas with a ship based operator. Aerones point out that existing maintenance process can be "very slow, expensive and involve a high risk for the personnel", however they say "depending on the size of blades and the wind conditions, Aerones could clean or de-ice 30 blades (10 turbines) in one day with full efficiency and no component spoilage." Aerones CEO Jānis Putrāms explains: "While working on the drone we have thought a lot about safety. There is actually no single point of failure which means any part of the drone is allowed to fail and we could still land safely. There are also many other applications for our drone: one is firefighting, another is human rescue and also many sports applications."

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