Predictive Maintenance of Floating Offshore Wind Turbine Mooring Lines using Deep Neural Networks

The recent massive deployment of onshore wind farms has caused controversy to arise mainly around the issues of land occupation, noise and visual pollution and impact on wildlife. Fixed offshore turbines, albeit beneficial in those aspects, become economically unfeasible when installed far away from coastlines. The possibility of installing floating offshore wind turbines is currently hindered by their excessive operation and maintenance costs. We have developed a comprehensive model to help companies plan their operations in advance by detecting failure in mooring lines in almost real time using supervised deep learning techniques. Given the lack of real data, we have coupled numerical methods and OpenFAST simulations to build a dataset containing the displacements and rotations of a turbine's floating platform across all directions. These time series and their corresponding frequency spectra are used to obtain a set of key statistical parameters, including means and standard deviations, peak frequencies, and several relevant momenta. We have designed and trained a Deep Neural Network to understand and distinguish amongst a series of common failure modes for mooring lines considering a range of metocean and structural conditions. We have obtained promising results when monitoring severe changes in the line's mass and damping using short time spans, achieving a 95.7% validation accuracy when detecting severe biofouling failure.