True digital twins

In the North Sea between the United Kingdom, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and France, more than 600 offshore structures have exceeded or will soon exceed their original design lifetime. The industry is facing extensive investments to upgrade or reinforce the existing infrastructure in order to maintain the present oil and gas production in the future.

In the less mature offshore wind industry, wind farm operators are facing different challenges. They must ensure that the structures they have designed have sufficient strength to carry the loads of waves, wind, soil conditions and other environmental factors in the harsh offshore environment so that they can continue safe and reliable operation at as low cost as possible throughout the design lifetime or even longer.

To address these challenges, Ramboll has developed a so-called True Digital Twin, which is a digital model continuously monitoring how the structure is doing and updated with real time information about the loads affecting the structure. Now, this experience from the oil & gas sector is also introduced in the offshore wind industry.

Lorena Tremps, who is now leading Ramboll's Offshore Wind business in Iberia, but before was Scottish Power/Iberdrola’s project manager of the industry-driven EU-backed initiative called ROMEO, which aims at reducing the operation and maintenance costs of offshore wind power, says:

“The main challenge of offshore wind operators is to deal with massive amounts of information from the assets that are in operation. The benefits that digital twin can provide are very clear to us. Firstly, improve our understanding of our offshore wind assets, lowering the costs of operation & maintenance, and ultimately exploit the opportunities for lifetime extension. The digital twin developed for ROMEO is going to put Ramboll and Iberdrola in the forefront of innovation when it comes to asset and integrity management tools.”