Demonstration of a Standalone, Descriptive, and Predictive Digital Twin of a Floating Offshore Wind Turbine

Abstract: Digital Twins bring several benefits for planning, operation, and maintenance of remote offshore assets. In this work, we explain the digital twin concept and the capability level scale in the context of wind energy. Furthermore, we demonstrate a standalone digital twin, a descriptive digital twin, and a prescriptive digital twin of an operational floating offshore wind turbine. The standalone digital twin consists of the virtual representation of the wind turbine and its operating environment. While at this level the digital twin does not evolve with the physical turbine, it can be used during the planning-, design-, and construction phases. At the next level, the descriptive digital twin is built upon the standalone digital twin by enhancing the latter with real data from the turbine. All the data is visualized in virtual reality for informed decision-making. Besides being used for data bundling and visualization, the descriptive digital twin forms the basis for diagnostic, predictive, prescriptive, and autonomous tools. A predictive digital twin is created through the use of weather forecasts, neural networks, and transfer learning. Finally, digital twin technology is discussed in a much wider context of ocean engineering.