Bladena hosts seminar with Principal Analyst at Wood Mackenzie as keynote speaker

According to new research by analysts at Wood Mackenzie (WoodMac), onshore wind farm operators will spend nearly $15 billion on operations and maintenance services in 2019. Of this, 57% ($8.5 billion) will be spent on unplanned repairs and correctives prompted by component failures.

Today Bladena successfully hosted yet another seminar within the CORTIR program. Here, one of the principal analysts at WoodMac, Daniel Liu, joined the seminar as a keynote speaker. This resulted in an extremely insightful presentation about the recent research done by WoodMac. The analysts behind the research argue that advanced digital technology such as data analytics and machine learning will enable sophisticated asset management and can help operators optimize maintenance costs. Furthermore, Liu added that there are several reasons why such advanced digital technologies have not been implemented yet, i.e. the obstacle of collecting enough data.“In quite a few cases, the basic economics do not always stack up for digital solutions,” Lui said.

During the seminar the minimum viable product of the main scope of the CORTIR project was presented. Over the past year, Bladena has developed a Cost and Risk Tool (The CAR Tool) in collaboration with partners that aims to improve the decision making for O&M strategies in the wind industry. The overall objective is to minimize costs and risk.
The minimum viable product can produce simple maintenance scenarios and provide the optimum decision, in terms of cost. Planning a cost-optimum maintenance strategy can be a challenging procedure as there are considerable uncertainties which potentially can have a big impact on the overall OPEX capital. 
​Under this prism, a simplified crack propagation model is currently implemented into the framework of decision making. 

​Daniel Liu presenting to the CORTIR partners

​The goal is to investigate the importance of the different uncertainty factors (e.g. probability of detection, weather window, probability of crack propagation) and input parameters  as well as finding the right balance between accuracy and viable usability for the end-user. 

​​A reason why advanced digital technologies are yet to be used in the field are according to Liu that data analytics platforms need excellent historical datasets to produce quality forecasts and analytics. This can be difficult to obtain, due to organizational hurdles, the time required to digitize, and data management by OEMs and other groups. However, in the CORTIR project, one of the core partners is Guide2Defect, which have collected an extensive amount of data on different blade and failure types for many years. Therefore, it will contribute with the data which the CAR Tool will be based upon.
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The presentation by Daniel Liu included the possibility for the CORTIR partners to get an answer to their many questions. This lead to a great number of interesting questions and was a foundation for a fruitful discussion for the rest of the day.

For further information please visit www.bladena.com, https://cortirproject.weebly.com, and/or contact CORTIR Project Manager CTO Find Mølholt Jensen +45 53700276 fmj@bladena.com.

​The whole value chain of the wind industry was gathered at the seminar.