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Wind turbine digital twins

The Wind Avatar® tool is proposed in the context of the current and rapid development of wind energy, in particular offshore wind that gives the possibility to exploit new significant wind resources.

The distance from the coast also helps to minimize visual and acoustic pollution and gives access to larger areas.
In return, design, operation, and maintenance of wind turbines are challenging tasks as they are costly assets which are subjected to complex environmental loading leading to potentially high O&M costs.

The digitalization at work in the industry allows the collection of large volumes of data and their exploitation by algorithms and physical models. In particular, the concept of Digital Twins has emerged and is defined as “a software representation of a physical asset, system or process designed to detect, prevent, predict, and optimize through (real time) analytics to deliver business value” (GE Digital).

Digital Twin technology seems promising to meet the challenges posed by the development of wind energy, particularly in terms of O&M optimization. The concept involves different disciplines and technologies : sensors, inspection, data collection & storage, physical modeling, machine learning, dashboarding, Key Performance Indicators generation, etc…

Digital twin

Applications

Wind Avatar®is a suite of digital services focused on the analysis of design, operational & monitoring data from Wind Turbines to help operators to improve the Operation & Maintenance (O&M) of their assets. Different approaches are used to leverage available data ranking from physics-based to data-based models.

Wind Avatar® enables different functionalities :

Wind Turbine reverse engineering
Performance analysis & optimization
Loads virtual sensing
Vibrations analysis
Optimal monitoring plan

Related available services :

Dashboarding
Time-series database
Secured servers or cloud
KPIs analysis & troubleshooting
Instrumentation

Wind Turbine Reverse engineering

Identify the properties of your Wind Turbine

Aerodynamics : reconstruction of blades properties from scan

Control: identification of the control strategy from SCADA data

Structure: calibration of mechanical properties

Performance optimization

Electrical power Normal Behavior Model (NBM) from SCADA data

Electrical power Normal Behavior Model (NBM) from SCADA data

Application : power production optimization
Under-performance detection
Nacelle misalignment inversion

Loads virtual sensing

Estimation of structural components loads over wind turbines life
Virtual sensing consists in the propagation of the information contained in the available operational data (SCADA statistics, sensors time series) to other locations of the assets where no sensors are available. The propagation is made by a physical model that contains all the required physics and which consistency with the data from the real asset is ensured.