Closing the half-century gap for wind farm monitoring tech

The £4m, EPSRC-funded project is aiming to improve the way in which wind farms are maintained and managed, according to Dr David Flynn, director of the Smart Systems Group (SSG) at Heriot-Watt University, and a member of the research consortium.

Despite being a 50 year-old technology, there is still no industry and academia-wide consensus on how best to monitor and maintain wind farms, said Flynn.

“On an offshore wind farm, you can have around 10 to 20 false alarms each minute,” he said. “So to give us access to the right information, and to put us ahead of the curve in terms of the lifecycle of these assets, we have developed novel sensing technologies to inspect these systems in the field.”

One such technology, which will be developed by Flynn and colleagues at Heriot-Watt, is a dolphin-inspired low-frequency sonar, to be installed on an autonomous vehicle to inspect undersea cables.