"**Project vision**
The Multi-Platform Inspection, Maintenance & Repair in extreme environments (MIMRee) project will introduce a step-change in the Operations and Maintenance (O&M) of offshore wind farms by removing humans from the loop during the inspection, maintenance and repair (IMR) of offshore wind turbine blades. The aim is to significantly reduce the costs and turbine downtime associated with these tasks and reduce the H&S risks of using rope access technicians.
In this project, the multi autonomous platform approach will be demonstrated for a use case in offshore renewables; however, the developed autonomous vehicle surface vessel hub, Human-Machine Interface (HMI), robotic teaming and communications, and automated mission planning will also have applications in the offshore Oil & Gas, Search and Rescue and Defense sectors.
**Key objectives**
* Remove the need to send humans offshore to carry out wind turbine blade IMR tasks;
* Remove the need to shut wind turbines down to carry out blade inspections;
* Reduce the risk of using autonomous vehicles offshore to carry out asset IMR tasks;
* Safely demonstrate a fully autonomous approach to blade IMR tasks in real-world operating conditions;
* Establish the business case for using autonomous vehicles for blade IMR;
* Develop a roadmap for transferring the MIMRee system to other relevant industries.
**Main areas of focus**
The developed MIMRee system will comprise of an Autonomous Surface Vessel (ASV) with capabilities to autonomously transport, charge and deploy UAVs and blade IMR robots at offshore wind farms. The UAVs will be developed to both autonomously inspect wind turbine blades and deploy blade IMR robots on stationary wind turbine blades. The blade IMR robot will be developed to conduct both autonomous NDT inspections and maintenance and repairs of wind turbine blades. Two-way communication with the ASV and on-board autonomous vehicles will be enabled by a HMI, enabling an onshore operator to both view gathered inspection data and issue automatically generated IMR mission plans. A novel sensor will be developed which can record images of moving wind turbine blades, which could be integrated with the UAVs and/or ASV. All technologies will be tested, validated and demonstrated in representative real-world conditions.
**Project team**
The project is led by Plant Integrity Limited who are collaborating with Thales UK Limited, Wootzano Limited, BladeBug Limited, Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult, University of Manchester, University of Bristol, Royal Holloway University of London and Royal College of Art to develop and demonstrate a prototype version of the MIMRee."
"Offshore wind energy has been instrumental in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and rendering the UK less dependent on imports to cover its energy needs. As such, large investment programmes and favourable legislation have been driving growth in the sector with overall capacity doubling every five years, a trend that is set to continue by 2030. However, offshore wind energy costs remain high and the increasing depth and distance from the shore continue to drive maintenance costs up, particularly those associated with accessing the turbines for maintenance crews. In particular, dealing with marine growth through traditional means (i.e. manually cleaning the access ladders) becomes increasingly costly, challenging, dangerous, and ineffective.
CleanWinTur will automate this process with a permanently installed system that will utilise techniques such as ultrasound, UV-C and thermal sterilisation to prevent marine growth on the access ladders, reducing respective costs and dangers.
Corrosion in pipelines costs the Oil & Gas sector millions of pounds in clean-up, maintenance and litigation.
Guided Wave systems are used to conduct long range inspections of pipelines to detect corrosion remotely,
particularly in inaccessible areas. There is a requirement from the industry to monitor the health of pipeline
infrastructure and a trend towards ascertaining holistic coverage whilst increasing the probability of detection.
In order to achieve this, a new generation of Guided Wave monitoring systems needs to be created. Previous
generations of Guided Wave systems are inspection orientated, with the need for service engineers making
scheduled inspections and manually assessing the data. This collaborative R&D project aims to develop a
modularised Guided Wave monitoring sub assembly part containing on-board power and communications,
which could be synchronised to produce a distributed monitoring network. This would provide more frequent
information regarding the health of the infrastructure and flag up incipient corrosion and the appropriate
locations for further targeted labour-intensive inspection.
HiTClean addresses a number of related safety critical, security of energy supply, production economic and
maintenance challenges in the life cycle of Oil&Gas offshore production installations (e.g. platforms and FPSOs)
subsea assets including pipelines and production pressure components. The project will develop novel guided
wave ultrasonic technology for subsea pipelines to be deployed by diver or a Remote Operating Vehicle (ROV):
(A) Condition Monitoring (CM) for the early detection of in-service defects, e.g. corrosion - using Long Range
Guided Wave Ultrasonic (LR-GWU) Pulse Echo (PE) technology, Teletest Focus electronic instrument, encircling
ultrasonic sensors and signal processing for the on-line (in-production) innovative inspection of subsea pipes
carrying hydrocarbons, (B) Innovative High Power - Continuous Wave (CW) LR-GWU electronic instrument and
transmitters to dislodge and remove accumulated debris fouling in subsea & topside pipelines at temperatures
of up to 400°C, (C) for pipe regions susceptible to fouling - innovative Moderate Power CW LR-GWU electronic
instrumentation and transmitters for fouling prevention in subsea pipelines at temperatures of up to 400°C.
RiviT is a collaborative project between leading Aircraft Maintenance Repair & Overhaul companies and NDT equipment specialists to provide a cost-effective solution to investigate the onset of crack propogation at difficult to access doubler repaired aircraft panels. The system will use a niche ultrasonic technique to qualitatively give a rapid indication whether a previously repaired aircraft panel has become defective or not without dissassembly of the entire airframe.
The aim of this project is to develop, and to demonstrate, a novel real-time monitoring system to detect in-service degradation in offshore wind turbine support structures using ultrasonic guided waves. This system uses active sonic/ultrasonic waves to cover the whole volume of concern to detect fatigue cracking at welds, and possibly at other locations, in the pile and transition piece. Fatigue performance of current structures is estimated by extrapolation from potentially unrepresentative data, so the possibility exists of cracking before the end of the design life. There may be over 1km of weld in the entire structure and potential sites of cracking may not be easily predicted, so that any monitoring system must be capable of crack detection over a large volume of material. The method will allow cracks to be detected across a large volume of material and is expected to save considerable costs of local examination of welds, especially when these are underwater and/or around the mud line. The project will develop designs of sensors, monitoring procedures and electronics and will be demonstrated on a structure offshore.
The goal is to achieve nondestructive inspection (NDI) of nuclear power generation and reprocessing plant pipework carrying cooling water or generator steam, along pipe runs that are embedded in concrete, buried underground and/or clad in protective coatings such as plastic or bitumen. Key examples are (i) primary coolant and steamline pipework passing respectively through the concrete primary and secondary containment walls; and (ii) pipework for spent fuel cooling. Any breach of these pipes carries risks of nuclear radiation leakage and shut down for repair. Embedding/cladding materials all highly attenuate ultrasound, making current ultrasonic NDI practice in nuclear plant unusable or requiring cladding removal. The innovative solution is to use low frequency guided ultrasonics (LFGU), which can propagate through embedding and cladding materials, in both periodic inspection and continuous structural health monitoring modes. Enhanced signal to noise ratios through new high power transducers and low noise receiver combined with advanced signal processing for trend analysis will allow detection of smaller crack and corrosion defects than hitherto possible by LFGU.
Future generation aircraft will consist mostly of carbon composite materials. The modes of failure in composite intensive aircraft are not fully known as they are still near the beginning of their design life, although it is clear that they are susceptible to internal impact damage, not visible at the surface. Yet current NDI of composites in production and service is still largely manual with low area coverage and NDI images are difficult to interpret for any technique because of macroscopic structural anisotropy. To address these problems the project proposes two key NDI innovations: (1) Up to 100% volume NDI coverage using gantry deployed, CAD controlled robotics so that inspection records at any point can be accurately compared at successive maintenance downtime intervals to allow health diagnostics and progostics. (2) A step increase in current detection probability for composite defects implemented through an inference engine performing similarity analysis on spatial and temporal changes in images with coherent noise removal performed by Bayesian separation. The innovations, validated using ultrasonic NDI, are applicable to any type of NDI sensor.
Bio-fouling is the unwanted adhesion of biological materials to any wetted surface and it grows continuously in thickness with sustained immersion. Fouling causes severe structural loading on all the submerged components of marine electricity generators, lowers the efficiency of generation and can disable a generator totally through the clogging up of moving components in turbines or pumps. Existing anti-fouling coating techniques applied to ship hulls cost £3.8 billion pa worldwide, yet fouling still causes an extra fuel cost of £5.1 billion pa. So for marine generators a novel fouling prevention system is proposed, usable on any generator design, which deploys low power quasi-continuous low KHz guided ultrasonic waves, mode selected both to repel bio-molecules and couple into all the submerged generator components from a single source location, to cost effectively, without harm to marine life, prevent fouling with 100% surface coverage, avoiding all downtime for fouling removal.
There are 29,000km of high voltage overhead transmission cables in the UK, operating in severe conditions of heat and cold, moisture, voltage stress, wind induced vibration, overloads and structural fatigue, all of which can cause catastrophic failure. The MOSAIC project aims to prototype a novel method of combined monitoring and enhancement of the structural health of these cables, more technically effective, cost effective and safer than existing passive monitoring techniques i.e. infra-red and visual imaging using helicopters and human inspectors. In the MOSAIC technology one sensor module, in a fixed location on a cable and self-powered by inductive harvesting of energy from the cable, will permanently and in real time monitor a cable to: (1) Measure vibrations, which are a major cause of cable fatigue, and actively cancel them through automatic electromechanical means. (2) Actively detect early signs of cable fatigue and track its growth using long range guided ultrasound, which can access cable areas impossible with infrared and visual sensing. (3) Wirelessly transmit essential data including cable location to a base station, for instant maintenance decision making.
The project aim is the early detection of creep cracking, fatigue cracking and erosion thinning in superheated steamlines in nuclear plants through the use of a continuous structural health monitoring system permanently installed on line pipe work and providing 100% pipe coverage at all times. This system (ULTRASTEAMLINE) will work through the innovative use of long range guided ultrasound with dry acoustic coupling to piezoelectric transducers with long life operation at 350C. Existing inspection practice at outages leaves many large defects undetected because 100% coverage is only reached over 10 years. The system performance target is to detect and track the growth of all defects > 0.25% of pipe wall cross sectional area and ideally > 0.05% , greatly reducing the need for inspection at outages, repairs and incidence of pipe failure , to save ~ 3.5 days per reactor pa of planned and forced outage time. Estimated potential global savings in outage costs are £1.2bnpa and the UK/EEA ROI ~ 54:1. pa.
Major innovations to achieve are dry acoustic coupling and transducers able to perform at high temperstures
Offshore wind farms are an attractive renewable energy source because they overcome the objections of visual and noise intrusion that apply to onshore wind and the time averaged capacity per turbine rating is higher. However the life cycle costs are much higher and require reduction by some 50% to achieve the levelised costs of onshore wind. A major contribution to these costs (~6%) arise from the corrosion and biofouling of the foundations. The objectives of the project are to establish the technical feasibility of a cost effective generic and integrated ultrasonic/acoustic system applicable to all foundation designs for (i) continuous monitoring of the detection of early stage corrosion and fouling build up and (ii) simultaneous prevention of fouling in the first instance. It is targted that over a foundation life cycle the system will reduce by 50% the existing costs of periodic inspections, corrosion repairs and fouling removal as well as reducing the hazards of these practices.
We aim to provide mine operators with a rapid method of detecting and removing calcium and similar deposits from in service check valves without stopping production, thus extending the life of expensive components, reducing the cost of maintenance by 50%pa and downtime by 5%pa. In the case of cyanidation, exposure of maintenance operatives to cyanide will be reduced to zero for certain tasks, presenting obvious health benefits. The system will reduce the risk of contamination from back-flow, and could be applied to other industries where check valves (or similar) are used, eg petrochem, nuclear or hydropower generation. A novel ultrasonic cleaning method will be developed: the components themselves act as a cleaning bath so are not removed from service. A device consisting of a wave generator, amplifiers and high power ultrasonic transducers will be clamped to accessible surfaces of the valve to remove well adhered debris effectively without chemicals.
The objective of the TIM project is to develop an enhanced in-situ, non-invasive Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) method for assessing the integrity of hydrocarbon and chemical storage tank floors. The project will deliver a prototype system capable of in-situ NDT testing of large tanks. Storage tanks are prone to severe corrosion over their life that leads to leakage of the stored product. Current inspection methods require the tank to be drained and made safe for human entry for inspection therefore a faster, lower cost and safer method of inspection is needed. The concept is to create a novel in-situ Long Range Ultrasonic Testing (LRUT) device that can be used to inspect storage tanks without man entry. LRUT technology has been previously demonstrated to be the ideal solution for the NDT of pipes but further applied research is needed for it to be used as an in-situ method for the testing of tanks. The TIM project will create an LRUT system (electronics, sensors, signal processing, data acquisition/anaysis software) and techniques that can be applied in the field to inspect and diagnose the condition/integrity of tank floors (made up of flat plates) and their adjoining welds. There are some 40,000 large (diameters 50 - 100m) storage tanks in the UK, with capacities up to 1 million gallons. Overall UK industry savings are estimated at £60million pa. LRUT technology offers considerable advantages over existing test methods for tank floors, that involve the costly and time-consuming emptying/cleaning of the tank so that inspectors may enter safely.
SHeMS is a collaborative project developing a lightweight structural health monitoring system for aircraft. Through the development and application of energy harvesting, acoustic emission, and acousto-ultrasonic techniques the project will develop a prototype system that is capable of determining the structural integrity of critical aircraft component. The system will comprise of a network of independent acoustic devices that are self-sustaining and communicate by wireless technology. The SHeMS project is an opportunity to make a major leap forward in reliability and safety in the aerospace industry by offering continuous inspection coverage for aircraft both on the ground and in flight. Existing Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) techniques, while effective, rely on taking an aircraft out of service. This downtime is expensive and means that there are large time periods between inspections. The continuous coverage offered by the SHeMS system will enable the identification of delamination, fibre breakage, corrosion, fatigue, and impact damage faults at an earlier stage and will therefore reduce the length of downtime and facilitate more effective maintenance schedules.