Introduction
Offshore wind is a growing clean energy source for the future. Engineers have built advanced wind turbine installations to withstand harsh sea conditions.
However, operating offshore wind farms still presents costly challenges—one of the most critical being increased humidity levels inside installations.
The three issues caused by increased humidity levels
Humidity over long periods creates three major problems:
- Condensation – Harmless in most areas, but dangerous if left unchecked near sensitive components.
- Corrosion – Increased condensation accelerates wear on mechanical parts, reducing uptime and turbine lifespan.
- Mold and Fungi – Condensation inside towers and platforms compromises air quality and creates unsafe conditions for technicians.
Expensive manual inspections could ultimately be in vain
Making sure humidity levels are at acceptable levels at all times is, therefore, an important priority. But unfortunately also an expensive process.
This is why you sometimes see it taking up a considerable part of maintenance budgets as inspection teams travel to remote wind farms with expensive humidity detection equipment.
Adding insult to injury, these operations could ultimately be in vain, if condensation has already damaged installations before inspectors arrive.
However, these challenges might now just be a thing of the past.
IoT asset monitoring: Smart solutions to complicated problems
An IoT data tracking solution is a simple and concrete answer to these issues.
IoT asset monitoring uses small, advanced tracking devices with high-precision relative humidity and temperature sensors that can be mounted wherever you wish to guarantee safe conditions.
The wireless and robust devices will monitor humidity levels remotely and transmit data through nearby mobile networks.
- Firstly, this makes the need for expensive manual inspections a thing of the past as you will be able to read all data in graphs on an online data portal from your offices on shore.
- Secondly, you can set up alarms to notify you and your service team directly if thresholds are exceeded. In this way, manual inspections are performed based on real data, and teams can be sent to relevant places only – making them much more effective.
- Thirdly, with this data, operators can create compliance reports in just a few clicks to ensure and confirm that all safety measures are within the allowed limits.
Tell me more
Learn more and see concrete data readings by downloading our “IoT asset monitoring: advantages and use cases in clean energy from A-Z – in production, logistics, and operation”.
You can also examine our IoT Asset Monitoring from Trusted A/S by browsing our webpage on trustedglobal.com