Case study: Vattenfall
Aneesh Chandran | 3 minute read | 10 Febuary 2023
Improve availability and avoid failures on export cables with Distributed Electrical Sensing
Facilitated by the Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult, Synaptec retrofitted passive sensors to Vattenfall’s Aberdeen Offshore Wind Farm (AOWF) to monitor and generate live data from each export cable’s termination points.
The insights gathered enables Vattenfall to safely increase capacity of the cables, reduce unscheduled outages, and avoid costly cable failures through early warning of abnormal behaviour.
Early warning of failure modes
Identifies abnormal behaviour which may lead to significant damage and outages
Complex data simplified
Synthesis® software classifies data to provide operators with simple, actionable insights and warnings
Identifies opportunities to increase capacity
Distinguishes lower temperatures, indicating safe thermal capacity to increase export
The AOWF (also known as the European Offshore Wind Deployment Centre) is operated by Vattenfall. It is a test and demonstration facility, consisting of 11 wind turbines.
ORE Catapult drives innovation by connecting developers, innovators and academics to drive the development of offshore renewable energy.
The challenge
Managing subsea power cable failures remains the largest operational cost in the offshore wind industry, with 57% of downtime being due to joint and termination failures. In offshore wind, these locations are remote and hard-to-reach, connecting turbines to the offshore substation, or buried as the export cables arrive onshore. Although they are a known failure point, these locations have historically not been monitored due to the distances involved, the lack of space for power supplies and telecommunications equipment, and the high cost of conventional monitoring.
As an integral part of offshore wind innovation in the UK, the ORE Catapult had identified the need for identifying root causes of offshore wind cable failures, and were seeking out technologies to address this critical issue, with a view to testing at AOWF, operated by Vattenfall.
Our solution
Synaptec’s Distributed Electrical Sensing (DES) technology enables operators to visualise real-time data from joints and terminations, which allows more accurate Real-Time Thermal Rating (RTTR), whilst providing early warning of failure modes, before critical damage and outages occur.
Synaptec worked with Vattenfall and ORE Catapult to test and validate their Cable Condition Monitoring solution (now Greenlight®) in real world conditions. This enabled Synaptec to demonstrate the ease of retrofitting their DES technology to generate new operational and health data on a pair of grid-connected export cables. The data gathered was then used to examine how the extreme and highly variable electrical and mechanical stresses of offshore wind generation impacts cables over their lifetime, and characterise the early indicators of degradation and incipient failure.
Both export cables were instrumented by retrofitting their patented passive sensors to each phase at each end, and at the termination points at the turbine ends. A total of 19 passive sensors were installed and connected to one central DES Interrogator, which streams measurement data to a Synthesis® server for long-term storage and analysis.
The leveraged data improved understanding of the relationship between phase or screen currents and termination temperatures, which in turn can provide asset owners and operators with clear, actionable information about overheating, additional thermal headroom, and leading indicators of potential failures from moisture ingress and gradual insulation breakdown.
The results
DES correlations of phase current and termination temperatures were compared with Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS) measurements of cable temperature. This showed an important difference during the summer months where terminations were significantly hotter than the cable.
This also demonstrated that DTS monitoring alone fails to indicate the true thermal limits of the export cable system. By combining both DTS and DES, a comprehensive dynamic rating system is possible, so the operator can increase yield with high confidence and safely optimise export capacity on demand.
Figure 1. Installation overview
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