The era of big data has dawned, and with it a realisation that digitalisation brings better and more efficient ways to support offshore wind operations and maintenance (O&M) decision-making. Offline methods that collate historic data are no longer the only way to analyse offshore wind turbine performance. Low bandwidth networks with bottlenecks are also no longer an insurmountable hurdle.
This is where Intelligent Plant Ltd comes in. Formed in 2006, Aberdeen-based Intelligent Plant is an award-winning software engineering company, that specialises in providing innovative apps and value-adding solutions to a broad range of industries, including offshore wind.
Intelligent Plant has developed the world’s first and only truly open and secure Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) portal known as the Industrial App Store. The Industrial App Store enables the secure remote performance monitoring of equipment and processes through the analysis and visualisation of real-time data, and in the management and interpretation of process alarm data.
ORE Catapult and Intelligent Plant joined forces to develop and demonstrate a solution to make it possible for operators to easily and securely share live, high resolution data from their turbines and switchgear with app developers, app providers and their own employees. The App Store Connect is an innovative solution to collect and share real-time SCADA data whilst adhering to cyber security best practice that is available for a variety of stakeholders across the industry.
During Intelligent Plant’s latest project with ORE Catapult, it linked the App Store Connect technology to the full sensor suite of our 7MW Levenmouth Demonstration Turbine in order to demonstrate its ability to collect offshore wind turbine data instantaneously. Having access to real-time data, and high resolution historical data, is vital for decision-makers in offshore wind to inform operations and maintenance schedules and ensure costs remain as low as possible. During the project itself, Intelligent Plant identified an issue that was invisible to previous data visualisation and analysis tools.
As part of this project, the App Store Connect capability was also used as part of the Oil and Gas Technology Centre’s Hackathon, #Codeless, when it was used to collect data from the Levenmouth Turbine. The App enabled ORE Catapult to easily share its Levenmouth turbine data with over 100 hackathon attendees for the duration of the hackathon, and allowed end users to build technologies that used this live data to diagnose shutdowns and dashboard status. The attendees made use of Microsoft Power Platform connectors through the Industrial App Store to instantly be able to prototype new applications and dashboards from real live data.
By working with the Catapult in this project, Intelligent Plant demonstrated a secure way to share live data with people and online analytics for the wind industry – this will unlock many future projects that will now be able to securely analyse wind assets for the benefit of the industry.
Steve Aitken, Founder of Intelligent Plant, said:
We are so happy to have done this project with ORE Catapult as it demonstrates a path to commercialisation for any R&D technology that utilises data from sensors, or SCADA.
Peter MacDonald, Head of Engineering at ORE Catapult, added:
Offshore wind turbines are abundant producers of big data, and it is clear that better data management and analytics is key to improving their operations and maintenance (O&M). Intelligent Plant’s App Store Connect technology is an innovative solution to collect and share real-time data to aid this O&M decision making in the industry.
Following on from this project, Intelligent Plant is kicking off some new projects in wind and is in conversation with some key industry players and operators who are keen to capture more data at higher resolution – for quick analysis by anyone.
For more information on Intelligent Plant’s Industrial App Store, visit the website.
