The fibre optic cables, when wrapped around the entire gearbox, can provide a 3D map of changes
New technologies could make natural gas storage and offshore wind more reliable. (Credit: Pixabay/Julia Schwab)
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US has secured funding from the California Energy Commission to develop fibre optic cables for use in monitoring offshore wind operations and underground natural gas storage.
The commission has awarded $2m grants for the offshore wind project and a further $1.5m for the natural gas project.
New technologies could make natural gas storage and offshore wind more reliable
The funding will be used by the Berkeley Lab to develop innovative technologies to make natural gas storage and offshore wind more reliable.
Berkeley Lab’s Geophysics Department head Wu said: “One of the most expensive components of a wind turbine is the gearbox; they also tend to be the part that’s most vulnerable to failure.
“Often before they fail they produce abnormal vibrations or excessive heat due to increased or irregular friction. We intend to use fiber optic cables to monitor the vibrational, strain, and temperature signal of the gearbox, in order to pinpoint where problems are happening.”
According to Berkeley Lab, the fibre optic cables, when wrapped around the entire gearbox, could provide a 3D map of changes with resolution at the millimeter scale.
Wu added: “It could help identify problems with the gearbox at an early stage, which would trigger emergency management, before a catastrophic failure causing loss of the whole turbine.”
Wu noted that the project will focus on exploring ways to use the fibre optic cables to detect marine mammal activity.
The sensitivity of the fibre signal is expected to allow for differentiation between such as crashing waves and a pod of whales swimming.
Similarly, the researchers will also assess ways to use the fibre optic cables to monitor the boreholes of underground natural gas storage reservoirs.
A typical borehole, which is used to inject and withdraw gas from vast underground storage reservoirs, degrades and corrode over time.
The CEC-funded project will test a novel suite of technologies for autonomous real-time monitoring.
Wu said that the scientific challenge for both the offshore wind and natural gas projects is optimising the technology design and sensitivity as well as developing real-time edge computing technologies.
Wu added: “In addition to using commercial systems, our team is developing new fiber interrogators that will allow us to not only get to the original raw data but also play with the physics to better design a system that can give us the most sensitive signal we want.
“In addition, we will be developing machine learning-based edge computing methods to turn raw data into actionable intelligence quickly. This is key for real-time monitoring.”