The Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult has announced plans to develop a virtual environment for better planning and maintenance of offshore wind farms.
Led by ORE Catapult’s Operations and Maintenance Centre of Excellence (OMCE) at Grimsby, the Digital Operation and Maintenance Environment (DOME) is supported by GBP 600,000 (approx. EUR 697,000) funding from Innovate UK.
DOME will provide offshore wind developers and operators with a “unique” platform to progress, demonstrate, and test solutions to common problems facing the offshore wind industry within a detailed virtual world.
It will be the virtual environment within which models, digital twins, and data sets can be hosted in a way that protects the intellectual property of the products being developed.
“This is a hugely exciting project that will directly support development of the next generation of smarter, better informed offshore operations and maintenance – needed for the rapid expansion of offshore wind generation across the UK”, said Ben George , Head of Smart Operations and Maintenance (O&M) at ORE Catapult.
DOME could accelerate the development and trials of solutions, from turbine component replacement to robotic system integration, and radar mitigation techniques, reducing technology development timeliness and saving millions of pounds over the life of wind farms, according to ORE Catapult.
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“DOME will connect the dots between offshore wind developers and the different elements of the supply chain – leveraging new technology and techniques to help operators and solution providers develop and test their concepts quicker, safer and more cost effectively “, said George.
ORE Catapult has worked with partners CAE UK, Cognitive Business, Warwick University, and Microsoft on the design of the DOME.
It is initially focused on support for offshore wind O&M but has been designed to evolve to transform processes across the entire offshore energy life cycle.
The next step is to seek industry feedback on the design before progressing to a build and test phase, said ORE Catapult.