All-Energy 2016

Vicky Coy from the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult will discuss the ‘Reliability in a Sea of Risk (RiaSoR) project’ in the Wave and Tidal Seminar Theatre at 1510 on both days of the All-Energy conference.

For further information on the conference visit: All-Energy 2016

Marine Energy Technology Symposium (METS)

Elaine Buck, EMEC’s Technical Business Development Manager, is attending the Marine Energy Technology Symposium (METS) in Washington DC, 25-27 April 2016.

If you would like to set up a meeting with Elaine, please contact: info@emec.org.uk

Poster presentations

Elaine is presenting two posters in Session 7E on Tuesday 26th April (16:15-17:30):

• Reliability in a Sea of Risk (RIASOR)
• Integrated Monitoring for Marine Energy

RiaSoR Workshop: Reliability methodologies training

The RiaSoR (Reliability in a Sea of Risk) project partners would like to invite you to attend a free educational workshop to update you on the outcomes of the RiaSoR project and provide training on the benefits and use of the newly developed reliability methodologies for marine energy developers.

The methodology

Safety levels are a requirement for all critical systems, sub-systems and device components. However, the ocean energy industry is currently designing to standards required for oil and gas industry safety levels. This conservative design practice is based on the uncertainties present between environment (loads) and structural fatigue. The RiaSoR project will demonstrate, through the use of Variation Mode and Effect Analysis (VMEA) methodology and Failure Mode, Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA), how design, electrical and structural engineers can identify, quantify and improve design uncertainties. By applying VMEA, a balanced design safety level can ultimately be obtained, reducing design budgets and development lead times.

Who should attend?

The RiaSoR educational workshop has been established to transfer skills in reliability analysis to wave and tidal energy developers, particularly technical engineers and technical decision makers. However, the workshop is open to all interested parties to attend.

Why attend?

The ultimate goal is to ensure that the practical methodologies developed in the project are incorporated by industry and make a lasting impact to reduce structural, subsystem and component design uncertainties. The key benefits of attending this free workshop are:
• Learn first-hand how to improve reliability in the design of your devices and test programmes;
• Interactive application of VMEA analysis tool;
• Collaborative discussion on reliability areas to be focused on for more detailed analysis;
• Update on RiaSoR 2 proposal.

How to register:

This workshop is free to attend, but registration is essential.

Registration closed on Friday 11th November 2016.

Agenda

Day 1: Wednesday 30th November 2016 (12:00-17:30)

12:00 – Lunch and registration

13:00 – VMEA framework
– Introduction on reliability and robustness
– The VMEA concept
– VMEA in different development phases with examples (basic, enhanced and probabilistic)

15:00 – Coffee break

15:30 – Exercises on VMEA
– Work on VMEA assignment
– Presentation and discussion of results

17:15 – Wrap up and summary

 

Day 2: Thursday 1st December 2016 (08:00-13:30)

08:00 – Arrival

08:30 – Case study: Moorings and foundations
– The EMEC case study
– Questions and discussion

09:30 – Coffee break

10:00 – Case study: Structural component
– VMEA on ‘CorPower piston rod’
– Questions and discussion

11:00 – Case study: Electrical component
– VMEA on ‘Power converter with IGBT module’
– Questions and discussion

12:00 – Summary and conclusion

Agenda as at 16/11/16

The RiaSoR project is funded by the Ocean Energy European Research Area Network (OCEANERA-NET) First Joint Call 2014, in association with Scottish Enterprise, InnovateUK and Swedish Energy Agency.

Developing a reliability testing culture for ocean energy

Three of the leading European research and testing sites embark on development of a methodology to improve reliability in marine energy converters

Scotland’s European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) is working with the UK’s Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult and SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden to improve reliability testing, with the aim of building robustness into marine energy technology design and performance.

Funded through the OCEANERA-NET initiative, the Reliability in a Sea of Risk (RiaSoR) project will establish industry best practice in reliability testing for wave and tidal energy devices through improved load measurements and verification, while increasing safety in marine energy operations.

“RiaSoR addresses two of the main challenges identified by the OCEANERA-NET project: reliability and survivability of ocean energy technologies; and design and development of components for ocean energy technologies,” said Karen Fraser, Marine Energy Senior Executive at Scottish Enterprise and Coordinator of OCEAN ERA-NET.

“This will ultimately reduce HSE risks, technological risks, and operations and maintenance risks, with the aim to lowering the levelised cost of energy for the sector, and speeding up progression to commercialisation.”

The industry-approved reliability testing practices developed by RiaSoR will be applied through the leading ocean energy testing houses to ensure consistency and robustness by which reliability is demonstrated across all wave and tidal technologies.

“Every technology that has been deployed in the extreme wave and tidal conditions at EMEC’s test sites has encountered challenges with reliability and survivability,” explains Elaine Buck, EMEC’s Technical Business Development Manager.

“Developers are faced with a very difficult investment climate and are often pressured to push device development from TRL 4/5 straight to TRL 7/8 without the time to learn from experience gained during the testing and modelling for reliability of the structure or subcomponents. Encountering such challenges at sea can become very costly so there’s a critical need for robust reliability testing prior to offshore deployments.

“For a test site to provide a comprehensive testing service, we need to understand the potential failures as early as possible to reduce the risk, cost and time for the developer. At EMEC we’re always looking to expand our testing capabilities, and the development of this reliability test programme will be of great benefit to the marine energy developers who utilise our test sites.”

The RiaSoR project aims to educate the nascent ocean energy industry of the impact of variance mode and effect analysis methodology (VMEA) to foster structured innovation as technologies move from concept to laboratory testing, and then onto full scale tests.

“We want to develop a culture of reliability testing within the ocean energy sector”, explains Pierre Ingmarsson, with SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden.

“Therefore we will develop a programme for transferring skills in reliability analysis to marine energy developers through the testing houses. This will ensure that the practical methodologies developed in this project are taken up by industry and make a lasting impact.”

The overall technical approach will be driven by SP Research Institute, bringing their experience of reliability from the automotive industry.

Chong Ng, ORE Catapult adds:

“Failure modes are in most cases triggered by unwanted variation. RiaSoR will therefore adapt the Variation Mode and Effect Analysis (VMEA) methodology used in other more mature sectors such as the automotive and aerospace industry into an ocean energy VMEA.

“This process will be used to de-risk the uncertainty of failures in the structural, electrical and connection elements of wave and tidal devices and allow more accurate predictions on the load variations they encounter.”

By reducing associated risks and enhancing reliability, the project aims to encourage increased investment in the industry by both the public and private sector.

After the methodologies have been produced, an approved reliability methodology framework will be published for use by other test sites, and an educational workshop will be delivered to disseminate the findings from the project to technology developers and the wider industry.

Free reliability methodology training workshop for marine energy

The RiaSoR (Reliability in a Sea of Risk) consortium are organising a free workshop to provide marine energy developers with training on how to use newly developed reliability methodologies.

The workshop will also provide an opportunity for the partners of the project – EMEC, ORE Catapult and SP Research – to update the marine energy sector on the progress and outcomes of the RiaSoR project.

Funded by OCEANERA-NET, RiaSoR aims to develop and demonstrate an innovative reliability analysis method that will enhance and simplify the evaluation of the technical and economic performance of marine energy converters.

It addresses two of the major challenges for ocean energy: reliability and survivability of marine energy technologies; and design and development of components for marine energy technologies.

The RiaSoR training programme has been established to transfer skills in reliability analysis to wave and tidal energy developers, particularly technical engineers and technical decision makers. However, the workshop is open all interested parties to attend.

The ultimate goal of the workshop is to ensure that the practical methodologies developed in the project are taken up by industry and make a lasting impact. The key benefits of attending this free workshop are:

• Learn first-hand how to improve reliability in the design of your devices and test programmes;
• Interactive application of VMEA analysis tool;
• Collaborative discussion on reliability areas to be focused on for more detailed analysis;
• Update on RiaSoR 2 proposal.

The workshop will be held from lunch-to-lunch on 30th November to 1st December in Glasgow. For the workshop agenda, and details on how to register for the workshop, visit the RiaSoR training workshop event page.

Ocean energy engineers discuss reliability in a sea of risk

37 marine energy engineers and academics have taken part in an educational workshop reviewing new reliability methodologies for ocean energy.

The reliability methodologies have been developed as part of the OCEANERA-NET funded RiaSoR project.

Reliability in a Sea of Risk (RiaSoR) has established guidelines detailing industry best practice in reliability testing for wave and tidal energy devices through improved load measurements and verification.

Held at the Technology and Innovation Centre at Strathclyde University over Wednesday and Thursday last week, the workshop aimed to educate engineers on the use of ocean-energy-focused variance mode and effect analysis methodology (VMEA) to improve reliability in the design of wave and tidal energy devices and test programmes.

Commenting on the workshop, Raul Rodriguez, Head of Marine and Offshore Engineering at Tecnalia stated:

“I’ve found the workshop very interesting. It was great to hear from experts and from academia about real operations experience from the industry and test sites. I had some good discussions with the other delegates and facilitators from the project over the two days and I feel some synergies with current Horizon 2020 projects like OPERA can come from further collaboration. I would be interested to see something similar repeated in the near future and look forward to reviewing the deliverables from the project.”

The project has been a collaborative effort between the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) and the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult, both based in the UK, and SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden.

Pär Johannesson, PhD from SP Technical Research Institute:

“The automotive and aerospace industries have been using VMEA to analyse reliability and uncertainty for decades. VMEA is a flexible tool that can be used from the initial design phase with limited access to data, and to full system analysis. We’ve amended this for the use of the ocean energy industry to de-risk the uncertainty of failures in structural, electrical and connection elements for marine energy converters, with the ultimate aim of lowering the levelised cost of energy for the sector and instigate investment in the sector.

“We’re delighted with the turnout at the workshop which includes engineers from both wave and tidal energy technology companies. We had some really good discussions with the delegates, and look forward to seeing the methodology now applied throughout the industry.”

Now that the methodologies have been produced, an approved reliability methodology framework will be published later in December 2016.

The RiaSoR project is funded by the Ocean Energy European Research Area Network (OCEANERA-NET) First Joint Call 2014, in association with Scottish Enterprise, InnovateUK and Swedish Energy Agency.

RiaSoR 2

Marine energy devices operate in harsh environments but still need to perform reliably and produce an expected amount of energy, which gives rise to huge engineering challenges.

The OceanERANET-funded RiaSoR 2 project will use the theoretical reliability assessment framework for wave and tidal energy converters (WEC/TEC) developed in RiaSoR1 and apply it to the field.

This will enable WEC/TEC developers to validate their findings, and establish a practical condition based monitoring platform to prepare for future arrays where big data handling and processing will be vital to drive down operational expenditures (OPEX).

The RiaSoR 1 reliability framework built upon established practices from the automotive industry where a monitoring framework is applied to a fleet of test-vehicles. Through design iterations, the reliability is improved and a final reduced set of sensors are deployed in the commercial vehicle.

For RiaSoR 2, the chosen components for monitoring are equipped with several sensors to collect the required data, which will then be fed into the reliability process to reduce uncertainties. Sea tests act as case studies to feed the methodologies and training into the framework. The findings from this will then be trialled with the other developers.

The key objective of the RiaSoR 2 project is to offer a comprehensive suite of testing methodologies to wave and tidal developers that will enable a systematic approach to achieve optimal reliability and performance, while minimising cost and time-to-market.

RiaSoR

In today’s uncertain investment environment, the perception of technical risk is dependent on how confident the investors are that ocean energy devices will perform reliably and produce the expected output from their devices. As the industry is approaching a pre-commercial stage, in-sea testing and demonstration at various scales will be a primary focus for the sector over the next three to five years. This places a key role on the ocean energy test houses to put in place a rigorous testing programme whereby the reliability of these emerging technologies can be tested and independently verified before the systems move onto large scale array deployments.
The Reliability in a Sea of Risk (RiaSoR) project addresses this strategic need, focusing on the key engineering challenges that underpin the reliability and survivability of emerging wave and tidal energy technology.

RiaSoR will establish industry best practice in reliability testing for wave and tidal devices through improved load measurements and verification, standardising design guidelines for marine energy systems, and increasing safety in marine energy operations.

Methodology

The Variation Mode and Effect Analysis (VMEA) methodology used in other more mature sectors such as the automotive and aerospace industry will be adapted in the RiaSoR project for the ocean energy sector. VMEA is a method aimed at guiding engineers to find critical areas in terms of the effects of unwanted variation.

Project consortium

The project brings together three leading European research and testing sites from the north of Scotland, England and Sweden in order to develop industry approved reliability testing practices. These practices will be applied by the research and testing sites, ensuring consistency and robustness of testing to demonstrate reliability across wave and tidal technologies.

The overall technical approach will be driven by SP Research, who bring their experience in reliability testing from the automotive industry. They will focus on developing framework methodologies that will be deployed at the onshore Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult test site in Blyth (England) and the European Marine Energy Centre’s offshore test sites in Orkney (Scotland).

RiaSoR workshop

Bringing the first RiaSoR project to a close, an educational workshop was held in December 2016 reviewing the new reliability methodologies for ocean energy that had been developed. The workshop was attended by 37 marine energy engineers and academics. The guidance documents are available to download here: RiaSoR publications

If you missed the workshop, a video of the presentations is available to view below to ensure that the learning from the project is disseminated and applied throughout the industry.

RISE Research Institutes of Sweden

RISE Research Institutes of Sweden is a leading international research institute and innovation partner. Through our international collaboration programmes with academia, industry, and the public sector, we ensure the competitiveness of the Swedish business community on an international level and contribute to a sustainable society. Our 2,200 employees support and promote all manner of innovative processes, and our roughly 100 testbeds and demonstration facilities are instrumental in developing the future-proofing of products, technologies, and services. RISE Research Institutes of Sweden is fully owned by the Swedish state. RISE is organised in six divisions:

• RISE Bioeconomy
• RISE Built Environment
• RISE ICT
• RISE Bioscience and materials
• RISE Safety & Transport
• RISE Certification

We work closely with our customers to create value, delivering high-quality input in all parts of the innovation chain, and thus playing an important part in assisting the competitiveness of industry and its evolution towards sustainable development.

The RISE Group’s trademark is leading edge competence coupled with substantial technical span, and our laboratory resources are nationally and internationally competitive.

Catapult

ORE Catapult was established in 2013 by the UK Government and is one of a number of Catapults set up by Innovate UK in high growth industries. It is the UK’s flagship technology innovation and research centre for offshore wind, wave and tidal energy.

ORE Catapult delivers prioritised research underpinned by world-class test and demonstration facilities, collaborating with industry, academia and Government to reduce the cost of offshore renewable energy and create UK economic benefit.

The Catapult programme represents a £1.4bn funding commitment from the public and private sector over five years. Long term, the Catapult will be funded 1:1:1 by central government, the private sector and other sources of funding such as the EU and devolved Governments.