Operations & maintenance 70%
The potential cost reduction by replacing rope- access inspection of offshore wind turbines with drones.
90%
The potential decrease in lost revenue due to down-time during inspection. Results in Engineering
Offshore automation
Innvotek have launched a number of products in this area over the past few years, most notably its Firefly Inspect and Amphibian systems. As Corsar says, cost savings and safety are among the benefits these technologies can provide, which are of particular interest to the industry for a number of reasons. “In terms of cost savings, it is very expensive to work offshore. And that’s really driving a lot of the cost of operations and maintenance,” notes Corsar. “In offshore wind, there has been a massive focus on reducing CapEX to bring electricity costs in line with what’s affordable. But now, I think probably 50% of the O&M budget is spent on turbine inspection and maintenance, and offshore logistics – so, the costs of sending people offshore are enormous.” With that in mind, Corsar is keen to stress that the Innvotek’s drones are not looking to replace people working in offshore wind, noting that instead the company’s products look to reduce the amount of time personnel spend offshore. “You can get the robot to do the highly boring, monotonous, long-duration tasks. And you can get the people to do the much more skilled, dexterous or difficult tasks – that’s kind of the ideal combination,” he says. “I think the technology is at a place where operators are now starting to see the value there.” Safety, of course, is another key driver of autonomous and semi-autonomous drone technology in the wind power industry. This doesn’t just mean keeping workers safe, but also providing them with good working conditions. As Corsar notes, “On an offshore wind turbine, I don’t think there’s anywhere that’s designated as a non-hazardous area.” It’s a demanding environment for personnel, many of whom are working 12-hour shifts. If drone technologies like Innvotek’s can help reduce the time required to carry out this work, it could potentially improve people’s welfare, reduce the likelihood of accidents and save significant costs on maintenance.
Product of collaboration
Of course, everything goes smoother when you have people to help you. For Innvotek, they’ve been able to collaborate on both the Firefly Inspect and Amphibian systems with the Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult, the UK’s leading technology innovation centre for offshore wind, wave and tidal energy. “We’ve collaborated with the Catapult on a variety of things, including Firefly. They’ve been a great partner, because their overview of the offshore wind market is massive, as are their connections,” says Corsar. “But their test facilities are unrivalled as well. And it was really the ability to test our technology at full scale at their facilities [which] brought us to see them.” Due to this partnership, Innvotek was able to take the Firefly Inspect system up to the ORE Catapult’s National Renewable Energy Centre in Blyth during its
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testing and validation phase of R&D, and spent several days inspecting one of the Catapult’s wind turbine blades. Firefly Inspect consists of a set of flight control algorithms that give semi-autonomous control to drone systems. These drones carry an active thermography system, which can penetrate the surface layers and see defects that are relatively deep within the composite material that the blades are made from. This can’t be achieved using normal photography alone, which can only capture surface-level defects. The Firefly’s autonomous capabilities enable it to generate a flight path, fly it, log where it is at any one time and then assemble the data in a way that’s easy for the operators to sort through later. With most current drone inspections, much of the data handling is manual, which can take an enormous amount of time. The Firefly knows where it is and appends that information to the thermographic images, making it easy to sort through defects. Rather than looking through the entire blade that will be in mostly good condition, operators can just focus on the bits that are potentially defective. The thermography technology the Firefly uses has been applied in other industries in the past, but mainly in a factory setting with a fixed production environment. As far as Corsar is aware, Innvotek is the first company to put this technology on a drone and use it to inspect a wind turbine blade. “We’re definitely seeing a step up in capability compared with typical close visual inspection that most drone inspections conduct,” he adds. “We can see defects that are forming under the surface of the blade that may well break out in the future, which would potentially give operators prior warning of damage before it actually becomes significant and needs to be repaired. And, obviously, that gives people time to plan maintenance rather than just react to it.”
On air and sea
Innvotek also collaborates with the ORE Catapult on its Amphibian project – a tethered crawler designed for splash zones down to -60m subsea, using powerful magnets to crawl on the surface of monopiles. The robotic inspection platform provides access to the interface between the air and the sea, where waves make contact with the turbine. This area has its own challenges, and structures see high levels of corrosion here due to the amount of oxygen exposure they receive from the waves, not to mention the effects of the seawater itself.
In offshore wind, most turbines have monopile foundations, which are essentially large piles driven into the seabed. These monopiles have to deal with a considerable amount of corrosion, so there’s a big need for inspection – both internally and externally. However, due to the nature of the sea, it can be very difficult to access these piles. For the same reason, companies are reluctant to send out divers. Remotely-operated underwater vehicles (ROVs)
World Wind Technology /
www.worldwind-technology.com
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