Hydraulics & Pneumatics July/August 2022

O2 Tidal Turbine sending not only power, but also data onshore Intelligent Plant recently won a project to assist the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) in deploying a data acquisition system for the Orbital Marine Power O2 Tidal Turbine. The system, which is linked to Intelligent Plant’s Industrial App Store allows remote access to real time, mission critical data and provides a cloud-based platform for EMEC to carry out power performance assessments for wave and tidal energy developers. This will improve accessibility of data for Orbital Marine Power’s operators, technicians and other stakeholders, providing cutting-edge tools to monitor performance and status of the device while in operation. The Industrial App Store has been integrated with the systems onboard the Orbital O2 tidal turbine which was deployed at EMEC’s Fall of Warness tidal test site in June this year as part of the Horizon 2020 FloTEC project. The configuration and deployment of the data acquisition system has been supported by the Interreg NWE OceanDEMO project. User-friendly dashboards User-friendly dashboards enable quick and easy access to relevant data streams from anywhere in the world. This will enable Orbital’s Engineers to access data from the O2 turbine in real time without a requirement for manual intervention. The Industrial App Store also provides data to EMEC’s performance test engineers, streamlining the analysis of the tidal turbine’s performance as part of EMEC’s accredited testing services. Scott Crawford, systems engineer at EMEC, says: “The architecture we’ve created for Orbital can be reconfigured to suit other clients’ needs in the future. Until now, technology developers have had to log into the device’s onboard systems to view live or download historical data manually. This new system will act as a web-enabled historian automating the data collection, storage and processing steps and can be built upon to provide a range of automated diagnostic and monitoring facilities. “For EMEC, this will also enhance our systems to deliver power performance assessments to our clients and is the first step in creating an online performance assessment system for ocean energy devices deployed either at our own test site in Orkney or remotely as per our clients’ requirements.” Data accessible from anywhere Angel Rua Santaclara, control and instrumentation manager at Orbital Marine Power, says: “Data acquisition from such a complex device as the O2 is hugely important for a number of functions. There are hundreds of sensors constantly measuring several variables and these generate a huge amount of information around performance of the turbine. Intelligent Plant’s Industrial App Store provides us with an incredibly useful tool that allows our data to be stored safely and accessed from anywhere, as well as a user-friendly interface with pre-made analysis algorithms that make understanding our data very easy.” www.intelligentplant.com INTEGRATED SYSTEMS