HOME-Offshore: Holistic Operation and Maintenance for Energy from Offshore Wind Farms

This project will undertake the research necessary for the remote inspection and asset management of offshore wind farms and their connection to shore. This industry has the potential to be worth £2billion annually by 2025 in the UK alone according to studies for the Crown Estate. At present most Operation and Maintenance (O&M) is still undertaken manually onsite. Remote monitoring through advanced sensing, robotics, data-mining and physics-of-failure models therefore has significant potential to improve safety and reduce costs.

Typically 80-90% of the cost of offshore O&M according to the Crown Estate is a function of accessibility during inspection - the need to get engineers and technicians to remote sites to evaluate a problem and decide what remedial action to undertake. Minimising the need for human intervention offshore is a key route to maximising the potential, and minimising the cost, for offshore low-carbon generation. This will also ensure potential problems are picked up early, when the intervention required is minimal, before major damage has occurred and when maintenance can be scheduled during a good weather window. As the Crown Estate has identified: "There is an increased focus on design for reliability and maintenance in the industry in general, but the reality is that there is a still a long way to go. Wind turbine, foundation and electrical elements of the project infrastructure would all benefit from innovative solutions which can demonstrably reduce O&M spending and downtime". Recent, more detailed, academic studies support this position.

The wind farm is however an extremely complicated system-of-systems consisting of the wind turbines, the collection array and the connection to shore. This consists of electrical, mechanical, thermal and materials engineering systems and their complex interactions. Data needs to be extracted from each of these, assessed as to its significance and combined in models that give meaningful diagnostic and prognostic information. This needs to be achieved without overwhelming the user. Unfortunately, appropriate multi-physics sensing schemes and reliability models are a complex and developing field, and the required knowledge base is presently scattered across a variety of different UK universities and subject specialisms.

This project will bring together and consolidate theoretical underpinning research from a variety of disparate prior research work, in different subject areas and at different universities. Advanced robotic monitoring and advanced sensing techniques will be integrated into diagnostic and prognostic schemes which will allow improved information to be streamed into multi-physics operational models for offshore windfarms. Life-time, reliability and physics of failure models will be adapted to provide a holistic view of wind-farms system health and include these new automated information flows. While aspects of the techniques required in this offshore application have been previously used in other fields, they are innovative for the complex problems and harsh environment in this offshore system-of-systems. 'Marinising' these methods is a substantial challenge in itself. The investigation of an integrated monitoring platform and the reformulation of models and techniques to allow synergistic use of data flow in an effective and efficient diagnostic and prognostic model is ambitious and would allow a major step change over present practice.

The project aims to create the underlying technology and methodologies to make a step-change in offshore wind farm Operation and Maintenance (O&M) over its present state which is overly based on costly and hazardous human inspection and intervention. The goal is a more time-efficient and cost-effective approach based on robotic automation, advanced sensing and condition monitoring, and innovative, multi-physics domain models for performance, aging diagnostics and prognostics.

This will enable the UK to lead in an offshore O&M market worth up to £2 billion by 2025 domestically, with the opportunity for a large share of a substantially greater market worldwide. The research will also address the skills gap in offshore O&M, both by replacing activities that require technical skills in short supply (e.g. offshore divers) and training PhDs and postdoctoral engineers to fill the shortage of future industrial and technical leaders in this field. The technologies and skills developed are however wider in scope than just offshore wind: any activity will benefit that requires O&M in hard-to-access areas, which includes most marine applications, most remote renewable generation, and even nuclear decontamination and disposal. The project thus addresses a key societal challenge of enabling lower-cost low-carbon energy, while maintaining the health in the UK of a wide range of underpinning science and engineering disciplines and promoting inter-disciplinarity: all parts of the EPSRC Strategic Plan and Energy Theme.

The project has engaged and will work with key stakeholders such as manufacturers (e.g. Siemens Wind and GE), system providers (e.g. Siemens Power), consultants (e.g. DNV GL), service providers (e.g. Fugro), NGOs (e.g. the ORE Catapult) and the wider international research community (e.g. the EU MIGRATE project). It has identified Cigré and the European Wind Energy Association as key dissemination routes and has set aside funds to engage with these, both in terms of travel to Europe and Conference attendance as part of a central strategic travel / dissemination fund, as well as funds for each partner individually.

The project will include usual best practice: it will maintain a regular coordinated presence at leading international IEEE and IET conferences, publish in leading academic journals and a maintain a project website. In addition the project will organise regular six-monthly themed symposia involving all academic and industrial partners as well as key national stakeholders and representatives of leading UK and overseas research consortia. These symposia will rapidly show-case and disseminate research results to the wider research community. The project will also publish a quarterly newsletter, which it will share within the wider industrial, government and NGO community, to promote consortium research activities and outputs.

At the end of the project, the partners will run a two day showcase of the outputs of the research. This interactive demonstration will be held in Media City, Salford Quays, Manchester, home for both the BBC and ITV in Northwest England. The demonstration scenario will be based around a reduced scale wind farm set up in Salford Quays. Live action will include autonomous air, surface and subsurface robotic systems working as a team to solve practical problems and an interactive element to engage participants on site. This will provide an exceptional demonstration of the technologies developed. We aim for at least one hundred physical attendees and one hundred thousand people via media coverage. Attendance and engagement will be supported through the provision of exhibition space and speaking opportunities. Children from schools in the Greater Manchester area will be specifically targeted for attendance of as part of our outreach responsibilities. The project thus expects to be a major showcase and advocate of engineering excellence in the UK to the next generation.