VolDrive –2024 Australian Good Design Award for Sustainability
- Published on: 23 September 2024
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THE GOOD DESIGN AWARD FOR SUSTAINABILITY RECOGNISES PROJECTS THAT EMBODY EXCELLENCE IN DESIGN FOR SUSTAINABILITY AND CIRCULAR ECONOMY PRINCIPLES.
THE AWARD AIMS TO INSPIRE CHANGE TOWARDS A MORE SUSTAINABLE FUTURE THROUGH THE POWER OF GOOD DESIGN.
VolDrive is making wind an even cleaner source of energy. Crafted by Onvol, the device comes to life as the use of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors surge. These smart real-time sensors greatly improve the way industrial assets like wind turbines are protected and monitored. However, traditional IoT sensors are a drain on resources with harmful end-of-life consequences. They rely on environmentally-harmful batteries and require frequent, hazardous maintenance.
Onvol’s solution? Find a new source of power. VolDrive harvests kinetic energy to power sensors in a way that’s both environmentally and economically sustainable. Replacing the need for traditional battery-powered IoT sensors, one VolDrive device can avoid the use of 4800 batteries and 500 kilograms of GHG emissions over its 10-year life span.
The device powers advancements in technology that would not be possible with battery-powered sensors. Features like an acoustic camera and real-time blade health monitoring increases the efficiency of wind energy harvesting. Additionally, the entire life cycle of the device has been engineered to design out waste, reduce costs and maximise the amount of usable energy harvested.
Onvol’s VolDrive has been honoured with the 2024 Good Design Award for Sustainability. We sat with Clinton Hopkins, CEO of Onvol, to explore the journey from a challenging request for a longer lasting battery to an industry-disrupting design solution.
GDA: The VolDrive design began with a customer asking for a battery that could last for 10 years. Was this a theme of longevity upheld throughout the design process?
Hopkins: Yes, definitely… We really built around making sure this is a very well designed product for all the people that have to use it. So it’s not just, ‘This is easy for us to make and we’re going to sell it.’ It’s about all the people that are along the chain… like the sensor company, that has to make [VolDrive] integrate with their system.
But also, how do we freight it? And how do freight handlers deal with it without breaking it and [also] make sure it gets there on time? And then, how does the technician pull it out of a box and cart it to the top of a turbine and get it in there? [It was] even down to, how do we compress the packaging so that it’s easy to dispose of on site? …So [it was about] understanding all those points along the road.
Even things like our harvester broadcast data to the sensor, which sends it to the cloud. It tells you how it’s going in its life journey, whether it’s struggling to perform, and also gives ID… So that reduces the need to go and service them. We will know before it becomes an issue which ones will need to be put through the rebuild cycle.
GDA: Can you tell us about the environmental impact of battery-powered sensors and how VolDrive offers a sustainable alternative?
Battery-powered IoT devices are becoming prolific. About 80% of all IoT devices are battery powered. Each [IoT device] generally consumes about four double-A batteries per year. We currently have something like 10 billion individual sensor nodes out there, and that’s meant to triple over the next decade… so that’s a lot of battery waste.
One big problem with battery waste is that it’s mostly uneconomical to recycle batteries, so around 95% of batteries end up in landfill. And of course, the minerals that go into them come from mining processes that are not brilliant for our planet. So, there is quite a huge carbon footprint per battery…
[With VolDrive] we replaced the need for about 4800 double-A batteries over a 10-year period. I think we’ve already displaced something like 81 tonnes of CO2 emissions in the first year of operation.
GDA: How does the VolDrive design uphold sustainability principles?
Hopkins: The good thing is that our product is part of a circular economy. So the internal componentry is the part that actually makes the power and some circuitry… It’s made of metals, aluminium and steel and copper, and it has a life of about 40 years. It’s the heart of the product so we can just refurbish it and give it four times its lifespan.
We’ve also tried as much as possible to source recycled materials. Then, we have a supply chain where the customer hands back the product to us whenever there’s an issue and we just refurbish the unit and send it back out…
GDA: What are some ways in which VolDrive reduces waste long term?
Hopkins: Basically, the parts that we replace are only about 5% of the whole unit, but that could have up to four decades of operation… So that’s pretty significant to what the device does.
But, more significant, is [VolDrive’s ability to power] the sensor [and its acoustic camera]…It can actually take an acoustic picture of the environment and then be able to zoom into different areas to tell whether that noise is correct or not for that piece of equipment. So, imagine you’re at a cocktail party and you just zoom around the room from one spot and listen to the different conversations… That’s effectively what we do inside a wind turbine blade…
If it was running on batteries, this would not be viable. You would just simply be better off accepting the hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to the blade and replacing them every 10 years…
This particular product also enables real-time sensing of blade health, so that we don’t have to do visual inspections or drone inspections and we get real time understanding of what’s just happened to a blade anywhere in the world. Without [VolDrive], there is no way to power this.
GDA: Can you give us an example of how collaboration came into play during the design process?
Hopkins: I wanted to go and travel and hop in a turbine. And, get the team to go [on site] for a day or two. We wanted to know how the crew worked and what their pain points were… Like, it could be really hard to fasten them to the surface. [Then] we come up with mounting mechanisms that are magnetic, so you just click it on… Basically making it really easy so you don’t have to read for a 10-page document to understand how this should install…
We couldn’t get in the turbine blade ourselves, because there’s quite a bit of OHS around that, so we did zoom calls with turbines in America. The engineer would show us around with his phone or his laptop as he’s crawling through different sections of the turbine.
GDA: VolDrive is 10 times cheaper to deploy in the blades than batteries, making it sustainable both environmentally and economically. What’s the societal impact of VolDrive’s affordability?
Hopkins: How quickly we can transition to renewable energy properly comes down to the profitability of it…. What I’d like to see is that we enable wind to be cleaner so there’s less loss or waste. [Then] we’re not having to cut up these blades and put them in landfill.
Really, it needs to be that we extend the life of those blades. Therefore, the assets become more profitable. Because they’re more profitable, more big businesses want to transition over from mining coal or pumping out oil to become a renewable player, which is a nice thing…
I think we’re just a small piece in a big puzzle, but having that can improve a lot of the pieces all the way up to the top… The more investment and the more scale we get, the better it is for all of humanity.
Setting a cleaner future in motion
From start to finish, VolDrive considers the best interests of users and the planet. The Onvol team’s design thinking ensures the device’s entire life cycle optimises efficiency. Practical, innovative and affordable, VolDrive achieves remarkable societal impact while making wind an even more attractive energy source.
VIEW ALL 2024 GOOD DESIGN AWARD WINNERS HERE.
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