Productizing Microfluidic Technology for Real-time Lubricating Oil Analysis on Wind Turbines

"The automation of Operation and Maintenance (O&M) practices in offshore wind sector is central to driving lower costs. The remote location of offshore wind farms means any requirement for physical human intervention pushes O&M costs upwards. This contributes to making the cost of getting offshore wind energy to our homes the second highest in the UK. Until now, it has been difficult to automate lubricating oil analysis processes that provide wind farm project owners and Original Equipment Manufacturer's (OEMs) crucial machine health information on key turbine components such as the gearbox and drivetrain. This resulted in breakdown of about 32,000 gearboxes globally last year alone. Such breakdowns could have been detected early by the right technology.

Diagnosing early, potential failure of component parts in a wind turbine is critical to turbine operations. RAB-Microfluidics has developed cutting edge microfluidic lab-on-a-chip technology to deliver real-time continuous testing and analysis of lubricating oil. Our ""Lab-on-a-Chip"" technology delivers oil analysis 1000x faster and 10x cheaper than the current ""send the sample to the Laboratory"" approach. Analysis of contaminants in engine oil, gearboxes, drivetrains etc. is a well-established method of detecting problems. This procedure is called Oil Condition Monitoring. We deliver this onsite, in real time, saving cost and improving equipment reliability. We combine our hardware technology with data computing by developing machine learning capabilities to utilise the big data generated from our hardware. This offers customers real-time continuous monitoring, early problem diagnosis, rapid decision making, enhanced efficiency and cost savings.

To date we have received various levels of funding to demonstrate the technology with laboratory based prototypes. Nonetheless, this project seeks to build on this and develop a field demonstrator to engage project owners and OEMs in field trials and in the reality of the value our technology can provide. This technology will enable us to solve the hard-to-reach and hard-to-sense challenges of the wind sector, using the data we generate intelligently and innovatively to forward model turbine behaviour and immerse businesses in industry 4.0\. We advance evolution of maintenance strategies to secure equipment reliability, increase Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and by extension reliability of turbines. This can reduce the need for physical intervention on turbines and effectively lower O&M costs. This will potentially reduce electricity costs from offshore wind, making offshore wind more competitive with other sources of electricity and ripple in effect to our electricity bills."