WILLOW
- Digitalisation
- Other
- Association/ NGO / Not for Profit
As wind energy becomes more prominent in the energy market, wind farms are playing an increasingly important role in maintaining grid stability. They are now required to deliver output as instructed by grid operators, often generating less than their full capacity to meet real-time demand. This is typically achieved by either shutting down some turbines or uniformly down-regulating all of them.
Although these strategies may negatively affect the fatigue life of the turbine, the optimization of these decision-making schemes is extremely complex due to the need to better understand and include many factors such as component degradation, the particular complexity of grid integration, or specific offshore issues like corrosion or the additional loads from waves, tides and currents.
In order to solve all these challenges, WILLOW aims to achieve the following objectives:
1. Development of a global structural health monitoring (SHM) based on loads, accelerations, images, and thickness losses, considering fatigue progression, pitting corrosion and coating degradation by using physical and virtual sensors combined with Machine Learning techniques.
2. Development of prognosis tools by combining SCADA and SHM data, using physical models and ML methods to predict the consumed lifetime and the remaining useful life.
3. Development of a decision-making support tool for smart power dispatch in curtailed conditions and O&M scheduling.
WILLOW project uses SCADA and other measurements as well as design information provided by Norther Offshore Wind Farm. Furthermore, WILLOW is using two offshore test facilities to collect additional data and measurements: the Blue Accelerator, located 500 metres off the port of Ostend in Belgium, and HARSHLAB, situated in the Gulf of Biscay, north of Spain.
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