Managing Development, Construction and O&M for Offshore Wind Farm Projects

As offshore wind farm development, construction and O&M take place in increasingly challenging environments, it becomes ever more essential to harness new trends in IT to improve the safety and efficiency of the project.

By Simon Gulliver, Technical Manager, SeaPlanner, UK

Use of Real-Time Wave Measurements for Operational Decision Support

The influence of waves on any offshore operation is a significant consideration for safety and cost. A detailed understanding of the wave climate specific to a particular site is of crucial importance. For more than 7 years Emu Limited’s MetOcean Section has been producing systems to make wave data understandable and easily available in real time, assisting operators to make informed decisions. The company is continually developing a range of tools and procedures for clients to enable tailored data to be accessed rapidly, directly by the staff responsible for offshore operations. In this article the author details how real-time data can help operators and gives examples of projects where clients have been able to save several million pounds, with indirect savings of even greater value, while at the same time enhancing operational safety.

By Robin Newman, Principle Oceanographer, Emu Limited, UK

The RIWEA Project

In order to keep a wind power plant in operation reliably, regular maintenance work is essential. The rotors, in particular, bear enormous mechanical stress and therefore require regular periodic checking for failures. Currently, this work is done manually by technicians rappelling from the top of the wind turbine, or by using a crane from the ground, or from a manually operated working platform. The inspection of the blade surface is done visually and with simple tapping tests. If a surface area looks conspicuous, it is examined afterwards by ‘coin tapping’. If blade damage is identified, high costs may quickly arise due to extensive repair work and long downtime. This article presents the development of a special self-propelled robot, which enables inspections on the surface of a wind turbine’s rotor blades to be carried out mechanically.

By Tilo Förster, Torsten Felsch and Norbert Elkmann, Fraunhofer IFF, Germany

How New Methods Developed for Rotorcraft are Making This Possible

While wind turbines were still using blade designs of the past, with generic, suboptimal shapes that neglected complex terrain and multiple turbine effects, aircraft and rotorcraft computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was already starting to compute and optimise wing design and rotorcraft multiple blade flows. Recently, there has been promising new CFD research that could have a large impact on wind turbine siting and blade design. This article describes some of this research.

By Dr John Steinhoff, Professor at University of Tennessee Space Institute and consultant to Flow Analysis Solutions, Inc., USA