<p>While floating offshore wind represents a significant opportunity to foster wind energy development and to contribute to remarkable CO2 emissions reductions, its associated costs are still substantially above grid parity; therefore developers, operators and research organizations need to continue the investigation and development of cost reduction strategies. At this regard, it is assumed that operation and maintenance (O&amp;M) contribution to the levelized cost of the energy for a typical floating offshore wind plant can reach up to 30%. Besides, mooring systems in offshore wind are considered critical components, not only due to their impact in the structural design, stability and dynamics of the floating platform, but also because the risk of failure of mooring lines is expected to be a key cost driver during the whole lifetime of a wind farm. Furthermore, since the majority of the know-how related to mooring systems is based on oil &amp; gas experience, which is considered conservative, it is assumed that the development of new and more efficient solutions and strategies for the design and operation of mooring systems in offshore wind is of paramount importance.</p><p>MooringSense is a research and innovation project which explores digitisation technologies to enable the implementation of risk-based integrity management strategies for offshore wind mooring systems. In this work, the MooringSense concept, which includes the development of several enablers such as a mooring system digital twin, a smart motion sensor, a Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) system and control strategies at individual turbine and farm levels is presented. The core of the digital twin is a high-fidelity fully-coupled numerical model which integrates simulation tools to allow predictive O&amp;M. Relevant parameters of the coupled model are updated as physical properties evolve due to degradation or to emergence of damages. Consequently, the digital twin assimilates information and measurements coming from the physical asset and environmental sensors. Besides, a smart motion sensor provides feedback of the attitude, position, and velocity of the floater to allow the computation of virtual loads in the mooring lines, the detection of damages by the SHM system and the implementation of closed loop control strategies. Finally, the integrity management strategy takes advantage of the mooring system updated condition information to optimise O&amp;M, reduce costs and increase energy production.</p>

A Concept for Floating Offshore Wind Mooring System Integrity Management Based on Monitoring, Digital Twin and Control Technologies

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/OMAE/OMAE2021/volume/85116

OMAE 2021

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