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Annual Report 2015
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NOWITECH
Norwegian Research Centre for Offshore Wind Technology
Summary of results 2015
The activities in WPB on operation and
maintenance (O&M) concepts and strategies and
the optimized use of material and coatings for
offshore wind turbine applications, provide the
industry with new
knowledge and
innovations for
cost reduction.
A total of 12
innovations are
in development
in WPB. These include new models, methods,
processes and technology at various stages of
development, see Table 4. The results cover the
whole range of research in WPB from O&M strat-
egy model development, inspection strategies,
rotor blade materials and structures, corrosion
protection (coating systems) and testing of corro-
sion protection systems. Some of the results have
already been transferred to the industry and are
under further development by new spin-off com-
panies. Examples are the software tools for O&M
and logistics decision support, which have been
used by NOWITECH industry partners Statoil and
Statkraft for analyses in connection with develop-
ing the next generation wind farms (e.g. Dudgeon),
and the remote presence concept and the silicon
carbide coating technology, that have been devel-
oped by former NOWITECH WPB PhD students,
and that currently are further developed in new
spinoff companies, EMIP AS and Seram Coatings
AS, respectively.
The PhDs in WPB are progressing well with 2
candidates successfully finishing in 2015, see
Table 1, including one externally financed. In
total, in WPB, 4 out of 5 PhD candidates financed
by NOWITECH have completed their theses so
far. The one remaining is already employed in
industry, but still expected to complete his defence
during 2016.
WPB produced five peer-reviewed papers
during 2015, and furthermore one book chapter,
eight presentations/posters on international
conference, ten reports/memos and two PhD
dissertations. Two key publications are:
• Dinwoodie, I.; Endrerud, O.E.; Hofmann, M.;
Martin, R.; Sperstad, I.B.: Reference Cases for
Verification of Operation and Maintenance
Simulation Models for Offshore Wind Farms.
Wind Engineering
, vol. 39, no. 1, 1-14, 2015. This
paper describes a reference case and a process
for the verification and benchmarking of O&M
models. The results from a comparison between
four different models are presented, and the
reference case has already been used by several
other parties for testing their models. The article
WPB
OPERATION & MAINTENANCE AND MATERIALS
Some of the results have
already been transferred to the
industry and are under further
development by new spin-off
companies.
Table 3: WPB PhD candidates successfully finishing in 2015. Vaclav Slimacek was externally financed, but his
PhD work was carried out in alignment with NOWITECH.
PhD candidate
Current employer
Thesis title
Nejad, Amir Rasekhi
NTNU
Dynamic Analysis and Design of Gearboxes in
Offshore Wind Turbines in a Structural Reliability
Perspective
Slimacek, Vaclav
NTNU
Heterogeneous Poisson processes with application to
wind turbine reliability