Remotely monitoring offshore wind turbines via ZigBee networks embedded with an advanced routing strategy

Abstract

As better wind speeds are available offshore compared to on land, offshore wind power contribution in terms of electricity supplied is higher, thus more and more offshore wind turbines have been and will be deployed. However, the severe offshore conditions make it necessary to develop reliable and cost-effective real-time monitoring system when building offshore wind power farms. This paper proposes an innovative method for designing remote monitoring system for offshore wind turbines based on ZigBee wireless sensor networks. ZigBee networks carrying variety of sensors actively collect dynamic data related to the system operation status, including parameters of the mechanical unit and electrical unit as well as the operation environment. Each wind turbine itself represents a single wireless network, which sends information to remote monitoring center by GPRS module to achieve full wireless communication. To enhance the topologic efficiency and reduce the energy consumption of the networks, an optimized routing algorithm is developed. A physical system based on such method is developed. Analysis and experiment tests with real wind farm data indicate that the developed system works fairly well. The fundamental idea as studied in this work is of great value for building reliable and affordable real-time monitoring systems for wind farms (offshore and on land) with enhanced safety and efficiency.

Health Monitoring and Safety Evaluation of the Offshore Wind Turbine Structure: A Review and Discussion of Future Development

“…Furthermore, as CMS and SCADA systems continue to merge, they will eventually produce one comprehensive system able to significantly improve the efficiency and accuracy of the structural health monitoring of the OWT. The general layout of structural health and condition monitoring systems for OWTs can be described as in Figure 3 [33,37]. based on the time and frequency domain analysis.…”

“…On one hand, the signals at all observed points may directly collect to the base station; on the other hand, the measured information of each node may be transmitted to the neighboring testing node until the complete data is obtained and is then sent to the operators [55]. At the wind farm, each wind turbine represents a single wireless network which transmits the measured data to the remote monitoring center by GPRS module in order to achieve full wireless communication by an optimized routing algorithm [37]. However, the increasing distance between the offshore wind farm and control center, growing data capacity, and more complex operational environments may bring more challenges to structural health monitoring based on WSN techniques.…”

Network lifetime enhanced tri‐level clustering and routing protocol for monitoring of offshore wind farms

“…However, if the position of sink-node is situated far from the sensor-node, then sensor-node will die soon after suffering excessive energy consumption for delivering data to long distance. To solve this issue, some algorithms [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] have been proposed which are aimed to save energy. These protocols assume that the sink-nodes are located at fixed location either near or far from the sensors fields.…”

“…A distributed protocol using hierarchical WSNs Dempster–Shafer theory of evidence to make judgment on sensor faults by CHs is discussed in [18]. The study [19] uses ZigBee WSNs to collect data related to the system operation status: mechanical, electrical and surrounding environment. Each wind‐turbine itself represents a single wireless network, which sends information to remote monitoring centre by general packet radio service module to achieve full wireless communication.…”

Resiliency in offshore wind farm communication networks

“…Thus, control center is established onshore which requires a robust, reliable, and high speed communication network for real time monitoring of wind farm. 2 Communication failures can cause irretrievable damage to a wind farm. North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) authors indicate that "information system failures contribute to a very high percentage of large failures" after examining 162 disturbances.…”