FEDER AFFIDA Project

A Predictive Maintenance Tool for Offshore Wind Turbines

Purpose

The main purpose of the AFFIDA project is to develop an effortless preventive maintenance tool to incorporate to the maintenance strategy of a floating windmill. Developed by PHIMECA and PRINCIPIA, this tool makes it possible to largely reduce the risks inherent to the development of entirely new concepts by monitoring the integrity of the different components of the system (anchorage, float, submarine power cable, tower).

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Based on an experience acquired in the offshore oil industry, the objective of this project is to carry out the transfer of this innovative tool in the floating offshore wind sector, by benefiting from the design and operational data made available by EDF-EN within the framework of the deployment of the Provence Grand Large pilot farm in the PACA region as an industrial case study. The establishment of such a tool will be an important lever for the development of future commercial farms, especially in the PACA regions by reducing the investment risks and the maintenance costs.

This maintenance tool responds to the limitations of installing sensors on facilities, which are often immersed (short life span, limited data accessibility, for example). Moreover, the amount of information collected is massive, so processing it is complex and does not offer any possibility of real-time monitoring.

To address these limitations, PRINCIPIA and PHIMECA have developed a data processing methodology that combines the following advantages:

  • the monitoring system is reduced to a minimum to limit installation and maintenance costs.
  • the data processing is fast to give a maximum of useful information for the daily maintenance management:
    • The exploitation of the results is carried out automatically and instantaneously at the reception of new readings;
    • Alert thresholds are set up to anticipate risks;
    • The storage of the measures is restricted to the cases of anomalies to allow a more in-depth study of the issues afterwards.

The major innovation lies in the combination of PRINCIPIA‘s knowledge of marine systems (and in particular the hydro-aerodynamic coupling of floating turbines) and PHIMECA‘s skills in data science, to create a technological platform that can be used to generate for a client a specific software component dedicated to the monitoring of the integrity of its system.