Making offshore wind cheaper by structural health monitoring

Since offshore wind foundations are located in an aggressive marine environment, the design and maintenance has its share of challenges. Since offshore wind is relative new, a first challenge is to understand how those structures behave under wind and wave loads. A second challenge is to setup a predicative maintenance approach. A final goal is to try to extend the lifetime of the wind farm concessions.

The solution to those challenges is structural health monitoring. With structural health monitoring, the design teams learn how the structures interfere with the wind and wave loads. New optimized designs will result in cheaper foundations. With smart fleet monitoring algorithms, predictive maintenance can be more than just a dream for the operators. And with the high amount of data collected over many years, accurate predictions can be obtained of the remaining lifetime of the structures.

24SEA is a company that is a leader in the domain of structural health monitoring, especially focusing on offshore structures. Since 2010, 24SEA has built up the knowledge to monitor offshore structures. 24SEA selects the optimized set of sensors, connects those to a distributed data acquisition system, collects the data of all structural health monitoring systems and combines this data with the operational and environmental data. Finally, combining monitored data with design models and extrapolating the data to the whole fleet of wind turbines, 24SEA is able to estimate the remaining life time of the wind turbine foundations. Today, 24SEA monitors already the foundations of more than 10 offshore wind farms in Europe.