Presentations
Optimizing operations and maintenance strategies in offshore wind farms: translating real-world offshore operations into state-of-the-art O&M simulations
Torge Lorenz, Senior Researcher, Fraunhofer IWES
Abstract
Our work presents an application of a new method to recreate the historical operations and maintenance (O&M) demand in an offshore wind farm (OWF) based on turbine SCADA data and daily progress reports (DPRs) from the vessels and helicopters involved in the O&M activities. This historical O&M demand is then translated into a high-resolution model of offshore logistics and wind farm operations. This interface enables us to evaluate O&M scenarios retrospectively, in order to optimize various aspects of O&M strategies. We used SCADA data and DPRs from two OWFs in the German North Sea to develop and train this method. The combination of these two datasets allows us to create a failure catalogue as a tool to describe the historical O&M demand. This failure catalogue contains entries for each failure message from the SCADA data that is relevant for the operation of the OWF. The relevance was determined by assessing how each failure affects power generation and if technicians and vessels were deployed to resolve the failure. Additionally, the work time that was necessary to resolve each failure can be derived from the same data. Based on the failure catalogue, a collection of O&M tasks is created. These O&M tasks specify the individual amount of work time and the involved vessel types that are related to each individual entry in the failure catalogue. This information is then fed into the O&M software OffshoreTIMES. Usually driven by a stochastic model of technical reliabilities, the time-discrete simulation of offshore logistics and OWF operations in OffshoreTIMES is now provided with real-world O&M situations as input. An exemplary application of the method investigates the added benefit of using helicopters for crew logistics and vessel sharing strategies between neighbouring OWFs.
