VATIS UPDATE Article

Engineers at Brunel Innovation Centre (BIC), the United Kingdom, are developing a digital platform that ramps up efficiency and halves costs. WindTwin will act like a pilots’ control panel for wind farm managers, giving them live condition checks on each turbine’s working parts. It will feed data from sound sensors on the turbines’ gearbox, generator and other mechanical parts into a 3-D virtual model or ‘digital twin’ that predicts which need fixing – and when.

That lets companies scrap scheduled maintenance and replace or repair broken parts before they do damage. “The data this software generates has huge potential benefits for the wind turbine industry,” said Dr. Miltiadis Kourmpetis, at BIC. The savings could be vast – by 2025, running 5,500 offshore turbines could cost a yearly £2bn – almost the same service bill as UK passenger planes.

The digital twin platform will use big data analytics and advanced visualisation and analysis to draw a real-time picture of the turbine‘s condition. This will help maintain and optimise real wind turbines, cutting upkeep costs by up to 30%, researchers calculate. Early ­breakdown detection will up reliability by as much as 99.5% and reduce losses from downtime by 70%. It also lets workers monitor and control entire wind farms digitally and remotely.