Indeximate and RWE Tackle Offshore Wind’s Largest Hidden Cost

Indeximate, the leading provider of fibre sensing-based cable health monitoring to the offshore wind energy industry, announced that it has demonstrated its cable health monitoring to the offshore wind farm operator RWE. Following their success in RWE’s 2023 innovation competition, over winter 2024-25, Indeximate’s proprietary Scattersphere technology provided continuous health monitoring tracking and analysis of two strings at Arkona offshore wind farm in the Baltic Sea, covering 13 turbines. 

Indeximate’s technology leverages existing optical fibres that commonly exist in subsea power cables to collect and automatically interpret distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) data. The monitoring and analysis included key areas of the cable protection system (CPS) between touchdown and aperture, as well as inside the monopile from aperture to hang off where installation of sensors for monitoring has long been a legacy issue for the sector. 

Over the six-month period, data was collected on the cables as they were subject to typical winter storm conditions, the effects of gravity and 7-metre-high waves. Dynamic strain measurements from DAS were taken 2,000 times per second at 10m intervals along the cables. Indeximate compressed the raw data in real time using its proprietary Indeximation technology, uploaded to their cloud portal, the Scattersphere, where automated analytics extracted several long-term risk profiles for the cable including abrasion, strain, fatigue integrity and vibration. 

Automated analysis of the data identified signatures related to cable movement, abrasion and vibration, as well as fatigue and damage. Analysed alongside co-registered wave and wind data, the long-term data record allows Indeximate to observe how the cables behaved in certain conditions, such as directional weather and specific wave heights and identify where issues may emerge. These insights have the potential to identify points of failure in advance, providing time for O&M teams to develop approaches to mitigate issues and avoid disruption and downtime, that can cost operators millions. 

Commenting on the ongoing monitoring work, Dr Chris Minto, Director, Indeximate said: “Our proprietary data compression and analysis technologies are unlocking vital insight into cable health that previously was unavailable to operators and allows us to establish health and risk profiles for all subsea power cables, helping operators avoid repair costs. We are hugely proud of our work with RWE to provide a clearer view of the condition of their cables at the Arkona wind farm in the hard to inspect regions inside the monopile and through the CPS, showing how weather variations effect cable health.”

Anika Borm-Schmelcher, Head of Innovation & Industrialisation at RWE Offshore Wind commented: “We have been impressed by the work Indeximate delivered to monitor our cables at our Arkona offshore wind farm. Since participating in RWE’s Innovation Competition in 2023, Indeximate and their data processing and monitoring technologies have further developed and now demonstrated their potential to deliver insight on our assets and to exploit the cloud-based resource for multiple approaches beyond cable health. The solution might finally enable RWE to better forecast the health of seabed power cables and, further in the future, to monitor the working environment of our offshore wind farms.”

Indeximate uses industry-leading proprietary data compression technology to enable the analysis of petabytes of long-term DAS data collected using optical fibres that commonly exist as part of subsea power cables, in Indeximate’s cable health monitoring Scattersphere technology. 

Historical pattern and trend analysis allows the creation of years-long risk profiles, which enable cable operators to continuously assess risks to assets, understand remaining life and benefit from early warning and detection of cable flaws. New fibre sensing and data compression approaches are enabling the offshore wind industry to reevaluate cable monitoring and the extent of insights that can be gathered on cable health, environment and the water column. 

Indeximate | https://indeximate.com/