PLOCAN participates in WATEREYE, a predictive maintenance project for offshore wind farms

The Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands (PLOCAN) participates with eight international partners in the development of the WATEREYE project: O&M tools integrating accurate structural health in offshore energy, a project that will allow to predict the need for predictive operation and maintenance of offshore wind farms.

WATEREYE will enable to reduce costs and contribute to the increase in annual energy production thanks to a novel system of monitoring and control of offshore wind farms.

The project, with an estimated duration of 3 years, has been funded by EU funds, receiving more than 4.7 million euros spread among the 9 partners of the consortium led by the CEIT Research Centre in the Basque Country, which has extensive experience in the development of sensors and monitoring systems.

The consortium for the development of WATEREYE has partners from five European countries, including Delft Dynamics and Delft University (TUD) from the Netherlands, Semantic Web Company from Austria, SINTEF Industry and SINTEF Energy Research from Norway, Flanders Make from Belgium, and CEIT, COBRA and PLOCAN as Spanish representatives. Thanks to the experience and specialization of each of the partners, the main points of the value chain are perfectly covered for the development, validation and exploitation of the technology developed during the project.

Results

The WATEREYE project aims to develop a set of sensors, monitoring systems, diagnostic and predictive maintenance strategies, and decision support tools related to the operation and maintenance of offshore wind farms.

Once completed, the project will be at a technological readiness level of TRL5 (technology validated in a relevant environment), which is expected to be used in pilot projects within 3 years, being ready for commercialization 3 years after the completion of the project.

Project fundamentals, mobile and fixed sensors

The WATEREYE project is committed to the development of a sensor and monitoring system composed of low-cost intelligent sensors, based on ultrasonic technology, which allow to measure the thickness of the structures and their loss of material due to corrosion.

The project will develop two types of sensors. The mobile sensors consist of a set of sensors located in a drone that will fly inside the wind turbine tower, making a scanning that will collect information on site about the loss of material due to corrosion, making possible the prediction of structural failures.

The fixed sensors are a set of fixed sensors located on the splash zone of the wind turbine, located in the most critical areas of this type of marine structures to collect corrosion level data.

Various tests, analysis and research will be carried out both at the laboratory level and under real conditions in order to compare and validate the corrosion models developed during the project, being a starting point for diagnostic tools and predictive maintenance.

PLOCAN’s role

Within the WATEREYE project, PLOCAN will lead the integration and validation of the developments obtained throughout the project in a relevant environment such as the PLOCAN offshore platform. To this end, PLOCAN will be responsible for defining an integration and validation plan that will collect the strategies and specifications to be followed to carry out the successful validation of the WATEREYE project.

A number of fixed sensors will be installed in different locations of the offshore platform that may present corrosion, and information on material loss and corrosion level will be collected with the drone, where the mobile sensors will be located. In this way, the offshore platform will be used to play the role of the tower of a wind turbine, being able to test the advancements of the project in a real and controlled environment.

Finally, PLOCAN will carry out various replicability studies of the solution developed in the WATEREYE project for its application in various marine energy sectors, in order to demonstrate the utility of the developed solution, thus opening up a wide range of applications and future lines of research.

FUNDS: H2020-LC-SC3-2018-2019-2020/ H2020-LC-SC3-2019-RES-TwoStages, grant agreement No. 851207
UE Contribution: 4.709.368,75€

Web: https://watereye-project.eu/
Twitter: @watereyeproject
LinkedIn: WATEREYE PROJECT


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