The UL CRIS team at the WindFloat Atlantic offshore wind farm.
The use of remotely operated vehicles could be a useful method to inspect and maintain offshore wind farms as the industry expands.
Researchers from the University of Limerick have successfully tested a robotic method for inspecting floating offshore wind farms.
Remotely operated vehicles created by the researchers were successfully tested at WindFloat Atlantic, a semi-submersible floating wind farm off the coast of Portugal. It is hoped that the remote vehicles can be scaled up to help maintain offshore wind farms.
These wind farms require regular inspections and maintenance, which currently requires human intervention. But the researchers said there is an increased emphasis on enhancing reliability and reducing operational costs as the industry grows.
To prove the viability of their solution, the team used a fleet of field robots, subsea remotely operated vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to survey the WindFloat Atlantic wind farm. This intervention, repair and maintenance survey was carried out by a team from UL’s Centre for Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CRIS).
One of the challenges in inspecting a floating turbine is the movement of the structure, which the CRIS team minimised by using an adaptive control system for their remote-operated vehicles, as well as customised machine vision algorithms for image post-processing.
The survey from these machines created high-resolution 3D models of the wind farm structures above and below the waterline. The researchers said they will make the datasets and findings accessible through gold open-access articles and proceedings, to benefit the public, academia and government.
“The significance of our research should be viewed in the context of Ireland’s existing offshore wind strategy, which aims to achieve 37GW of offshore renewable energy capacity by 2050,” said UL CRIS co-director Prof Daniel Toal. “Achieving this goal requires the development of intervention, repair and maintenance capacities and capabilities to ensure offshore operations are efficient and cost-effective.”
Wind energy has grown significantly in Ireland in recent years and provided 43pc of the country’s electricity in March, according to a report by Wind Energy Ireland. But developing the country’s offshore wind sector has proved challenging, as there is currently no port in the Republic of Ireland capable of deploying offshore wind farms.
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