COMPETENCE MANAGEMENT SECTION SPONSOR
New standards & design guidance
The non-specialist may be forgiven for thinking that following decades of offshore oil & gas experience, there is not much that marine and offshore engineers do not understand. The offshore sector has developed and reliably operated the most advanced fixed and floating marine structures from steel and concrete, rivalling in ambition and engineering prowess any mega- structure built on land.
Structural Health Monitoring was a concept unknown only two decades ago and the advanced electromagnetic, ultrasonic and optical inspection and monitoring methods used offshore today were as best early university research when life-cycle inspection, maintenance and repair methodologies were first developed for offshore oil & gas structures.
APPROPRIATE COMPARISONS We therefore need to ask ourselves whether the standards and guidance that incrementally developed to serve the offshore oil & gas industry are appropriate for a newly emerging, lean wind industry that cannot afford not to avail of the very latest developments in materials, manufacturing technologies, inspection & monitoring and use of contemporary reliability-based design and maintenance advanced numerical modelling techniques.
COST COMPARISONS
There is however, one major difference between the oil & gas sector and offshore wind and that is cost. Cost of the initial wind support structure and its installation (CAPEX) and cost of maintenance through-life (OPEX) contribute significantly to cost of electricity and for offshore wind, the challenge is to optimise each so that whole-life costs are minimised without adversely affecting functionality, reliability and safety.
ADVANTAGES
We have several advantages today compared to the pioneers of offshore oil & gas structures in the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas we still use similar steel strength grades, the quality of modern steel is on the whole, superb in comparison; fabrication technologies including automation and advanced methodologies for inspection and quality control mean that we have the wherewithal to consistently manufacture in volume high-quality structures and structural components in a cost effective manner.
Of course, the answer to this question is ‘no’ and there is a consensus within the offshore wind sector that it needs to update and improve its understanding in particular of fatigue, corrosion and failure mechanisms of this new generation of offshore structures and how to best utilise information technologies to maximise cost benefit through-life. Offshore wind structures unlike many oil & gas installations are unmanned, the consequences of failure therefore from a human and environmental impact perspective are very different.
Whereas for oil & gas structures an ‘acceptable’ failure rate might be of the order of a failure in every 100 million, we might ‘tolerate’ an unmanned renewable energy structure failure in every 10 thousand. The manner in which we design and operate structures of such differing consequences of failure is a major potential way in which the wind industry might reduce costs. This approach can however, only be achieved through the collection of new and better quality information from structures in-service effectively creating a ‘nervous system’ that can provide advance warning of progressive damage.
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www.windenergynetwork.co.uk
DEVELOPMENT TRAINING &
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