Marco Lewandowski

Preactive Maintenance—A Modernized Approach for Efficient Operation of Offshore Wind Turbines

Operation and maintenance of offshore wind turbines (OWTs) play an important role to guaranty and improve the reliability, availability, and sustainability during the life time of an OWT. Common maintenance approaches from reactive to preventive maintenance show difficulties in being applied throughout offshore wind park operations. In the field of preventive maintenance, the condition-based maintenance shows a significant upturn. This paper gives a valuable insight into a modernized approach to “preactive” measures in different dimensions. To this end, existing approaches for condition-based maintenance are pointed out. Based on this knowledge, a new approach, using existing information and knowledge to encounter relevant events, is introduced. A maintenance strategy by context enables a dynamical adjustment of maintenance time slots based on different information, like, for example, weather, the general condition of a wind turbine, and availability of staff. Finally, the concept will be illustrated with an example.

Planning of Maintenance Resources for the Service of Offshore Wind Turbines by Means of Simulation

In the last decade, the erection of offshore wind turbines, especially in the northern sea, has been showing a significant growth and this trend will continue further in the next years. In order to make the offshore wind energy competitive and attractive, the different processes related to the overall life cycle cost of an offshore wind farm have to be optimized. In this context, the cost for operation and maintenance (O&M) is estimated between 15 and 30 % of the total costs generated by offshore wind farms. Thereby, the efficiency of the maintenance processes is a crucial factor to guarantee sustainable energy and improve the reliability and availability of an offshore wind turbine. Indeed, the maintenance activities in the offshore field are a challenging task especially due to the harsh maritime environment which leads to high material stress and low resource utilization. In this paper, we model the maintenance processes of an offshore wind farm by means of a discrete event and agent -based simulation model. The objective is to schedule the maintenance tasks taking into account all real restrictions based on historical data in order to determine important factors and potential operational improvement. As an example, the simulation will be used to determine the optimal number of resources needed to perform maintenance activities by keeping the resource utilization in an acceptable level.

Deriving Information from Sensor Data

Not least because of the triumph of different IoT technologies, the uptake of sensor data during the use phase of complex technical systems has become mandatory. These data, especially in combination with additional field data, promise to improve the technical management of systems. Various concepts have also been developed to determine the usefulness of returning the data to product development. Regardless of whether the use of the field data analysis is carried out within the utilisation phase or over phase boundaries, it is also a great challenge to process the data in such a way that information and action-oriented knowledge are generated. The consolidation of results from different analyses to uniform priorities of systems and system components is crucial for the management of systems, for example with regard to decision support. Therefore, an approach is presented and discussed in order to support the systematic combination of methods for sensor field data evaluation. This includes both a general approach model and a corresponding system architecture both on a methodology level. This approach is illustrated by an example and leads to the conclusion that multiple analyses of sensor series using different methods together lead to more reliable information on system components. With regard to the summary of the contribution, the approach shows great potential for the faster introduction of field data analyses in companies, but further developments are required for the selection of the individual methods as well as for the data compaction itself.

Information Gathering in Closed-Loop PLM Systems - Social Networks as Models for the Internet of Things?

Different recent approaches from the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) or Internet-of-Things (IoT) area describe a product-centric view on data and information which are collected by different stakeholders and systems along the lifecycle in order to enhance retrospective analytics, predictive analytics, business decisions, etc. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the basic principles of information sharing, communication and collaboration in traditional human-centric social networks and discuss whether these can be applied to data and information exchange in the PLM/IoT sector. With respect to the methodology applied to this investigation, recent communication mechanisms in social networks as well as in product-centric IoT platforms are systemized and abstracted. Based on the transformation of social network means for IoT, possible improvements of IoT platforms are discussed, resulting in demonstrations of possible PLM usage. In summery, the paper draws implications about the adoption of valuable Social Network means for product-centric usage.

Information and Data Provision of Operational Data for the Improvement of Product Development

Today’s usage of supporting technologies like RFID, condition monitoring or further embedded systems provides a huge amount of data to the operation and maintenance (O&M) phase of complex technical systems. While analyzing this data for the purpose of more efficient operation is already extensively adopted, the transfer of data to other lifecycle phases is most often lacking. This paper will analyze the obstacles and requirements for information and data provision from the usage phase in order to support the development of next generation products. This is carried out by analyzing sub-aspects of data provisioning for product development purposes thus leading to a comprehensive framework for the reorganization of information backflows from the O&M phase. The findings are discussed in the case of a windfarm. The paper gives a valuable insight regarding the derivation of targets and action fields for information and data provision to improve the product development process.

The Internet of Drinks

It is not always easy to depict the benefits of RFID and the Internet of Things. Especially in research, it is sometimes challenging to find illustrative scenarios that grab the attention of the audience and convey a positive message of technology usage. Fortunately, researchers around the world are imaginative enough to come up with creative and sometimes – at least in the first impression – funny approaches. This humorous effect should not be underestimated in a world where new technologies raise a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt. The “Internet of Drinks” is an obvious play on words related to the Internet of Things. This paper will describe some example scenarios that utilize Internet of Things technologies to produce, control and monitor beverages and will show some obvious and easy to understand demonstrators.