Tidal Turbines

When the waves of the North Atlantic beat against the blades of a tidal turbine, have you ever wondered what kind of industrial computer conducts the underwater symphony in a control chamber 40 meters under the sea? Industrial computers are redefining the boundaries of marine energy reliability in an area where the concentration of salt spray is 50 times greater than on land, and where pressure fluctuations are comparable to deep-sea exploration. Last year, in a demonstration project in the Pentland Firth, Scotland, our underwater control module set a record of 18,000 hours of continuous intervention-free operation – the secret lies in the design of a multi-layer pressure-compensating chamber, which, even in the midst of 30-meter water-pressure oscillations triggered by rapid changes in the tides, was able to maintain the bit error rate of RS485 communications at less than 10^- 9.

In an industry where even the bolts have to be cathodically protected, did you know that the I&C systems inside the turbine foundation piles have to go through several hurdles? The pressure-resistant hull we designed for an energy group is a textbook case. Ordinary stainless steel shell will be corroded and perforated by microorganisms within three months, while we use super duplex steel + titanium alloy composite structure, with vacuum infusion epoxy resin sealing, successfully withstood the North Sea five-year cycle of salt spray test. More extreme is the self-cleaning circuit board coating – when competitors are still for barnacles attached to lead to heat dissipation failure headache, our active ionized membrane technology has made the surface of the equipment into a “no-navigation zone” for marine organisms.

How to maintain microsecond accuracy of pitch angle control in turbulence? The traditional solution uses the architecture of PLC on the water + underwater sensors, but the signal delay leads to a 12% loss in power generation efficiency. Our solution is to embed the ICP directly into the hub bay and connect directly to each pitch drive via CAN FD bus. The measured data shows that this distributed control system improves the dynamic response speed to 0.3 milliseconds, and even better is the self-developed tidal prediction algorithm – it can combine the flow rate data of the previous five minutes to predict the torque change in the next 30 seconds, and adjust the blade angle in advance by 0.5 degrees.

You may not realize that industrial controllers can also be “emergency doctors”. The fault self-healing system we designed for a tidal array has this specialty. Once a three-phase current imbalance is detected, the ICP will initiate a star-delta switchover within 80 milliseconds, while sending a localization signal to the operation and maintenance vessel via an underwater sonar module. This DNV-GL certified system successfully avoided a ten million dollar generator burnout last quarter, and now the O&M team can see through the stress distribution of the subsea equipment through AR glasses, and those days of risky operations requiring divers are becoming history.