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You may be hearing the term “digital twin” quite a bit recently, as a concept first introduced back to 2002, digital twins now already have much wider usage thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT) has started to become more and more normal. (In case you are not familiar with ‘digital twins’, here is our article regarding the intro of Digital Twin)

Today, let’s focus on a digital twin solution for the wind power industry — simulation of wind turbines.

For the wind industry, a digital twin’s value lies in using the data to understand the health condition of a wind turbine or a full fleet. The data provides valuable insight into when turbine maintenance is anticipated so operators can plan operations and maintenance well in advance.

Now let’s think about wind turbines. What kind of “behaviour” do they have and how to monitor it? Generally speaking, wind turbines’ behaviours are very hard to predict, due to the highly variable and quickly changing nature of the wind itself. The good news is that today we can improve it by using Digital Twins.

The Digital Twin receives data from the wind turbine’s sensors and simulates the behaviour in real time, offering insights into current health status, future failures and also detects underperformance. The wind farm operator will be notified in advance about any occurring problems.

As the dashboard view shown above, we analyse the data and put data in various formats for a better monitoring. On the top left, we put environment data such as weather, wind speed, component information, temperature to a barchart. And the barchart changes smoothly based on the real time data. Through the constant collection of this data, our digital twin model now turns data into actionable insights.

Click the picture to check full video

On the left bottom, the system showcases the turbines status based on real-time data sent back from sensors. Highlight the errors and also trigger the alert animation so that wind farm operators can visualize and analyze the assets. The result allows for advanced wind performance and predictive maintenance capabilities.

With the help of our solution, we can help increase revenue, reduce costs, and lower risk. Digital Twins of wind turbines allow us reducing maintenance costs by:

· Reducing the number of visits to the wind farm;

· Fixing broken parts instead of buying new ones;

· Providing a root cause analysis on component level (when, how, where and why it will fail).

By creating Digital Twins on wind farms, the performance of clean energy assets will enhance, making renewables more affordable and help the world in moving towards a Greener Economy.

If you are interested in more digital twin solutions, please visit Hightopo website for some inspirations.