Digital Twins Trends for Offshore Wind Energy

Digital twins are digital replicas of physical objects, systems, and processes. With the help of hardcore neural algorithms and data collected by multiple sensors, digital twin technology can reconstruct almost any measurable real-life operating object. 

Using the latest techniques, scientists can now simulate any naturally occurring phenomenon within minutes. As a result, digital twins can significantly cut your expenses. Digital projecting of heavy processes and their outcomes can help avoid crucial mistakes in implementing costly projects, which saves companies a great piece of their budget.

Now, digital twins are becoming increasingly popular in offshore wind energy to manage risk and optimise performance. By creating a digital replica of an offshore wind farm, operators can monitor conditions in real-time and adjust the physical asset as needed. It helps to reduce downtime and improve efficiency. 

The twin software is developed by writing millions of coding lines. The project is extensive and requires the dedication of multiple professional programmers and engineers to compute complex formulas into the code. After the projection - a twin - of an offshore wind farm is fully set, the company can use it to operate on multiple offshore wind farms for a lifetime. 

Why use a digital twin?

Digital twin offers multiple benefits for various offshore industries:

• Backtesting. Digital twins can simulate different operating scenarios, allowing operators to test different strategies before implementing them. It can help avoid costly mistakes and ensure that the offshore wind farm operates at its best.

• Automatic procedure. The project can be divided into smaller tidbits to enhance the overall output. With a manual approach, this would be an impossible task and require thousands of hours even if achieved. 

• Better decisions. As engineers have more time and tools on their hands, they can produce better decisions through mentoring and thorough discussions. A vast ray of digital knowledge helps a business make data-driven decisions.

Digital twins have minimal to zero error margins while mimicking natural processes. It increases their effectiveness in deployment to wind energy generation. Besides building an offshore wind structure, a digital twin can also be used to monitor the ongoing projects for their performance, etc. The whole process is fully automated, and users can set up custom alerts to notify the users in case of any casualty.

Wind energy gamechanger

Offshore wind energy is becoming more popular due to its cost efficiency and zero greenhouse gas emissions. Similar to the onshore counterpart, offshore wind energy production requires extensive data management on various applications. The output must then be exported into management software to build up the final product. The digital twins come early into the project, supporting different integrations to develop the designs and challenging analogies.

The Winds of Change is a digital twin of the Earth's atmosphere. The model is at hand to simulate the Earth's atmosphere to understand its behaviour better, predict its future, or optimise its performance.

Enabling sustainable solutions

Offshore wind energy can make a sustainable contribution to fighting climate change conditions. Digital twins look after the impacts on the construction and operation of the marine environment and wildlife. 

Using digital twins in offshore wind energy can help make the industry more sustainable by enabling operators to make better-informed decisions about the maintenance and operations of their assets. For example, by using digital twins to monitor the performance of offshore wind turbines, operators can identify issues early and take corrective action to avoid downtime. 

Additionally, digital twins are available to assess the impact of proposed changes to offshore wind farms (such as the addition of new turbines) on the environment and local community, helping to ensure that any new developments are sustainable. The never-ending benefits of digitalisation are available throughout the industry for future collaborations.