Q: Could you briefly explain your role and how it relates to the digitalisation of asset management?
Harriet Green (HG): My role as Principal Mechanical Engineer at Equinor within Offshore Wind operations predominantly involves managing and maintaining the technical integrity of our offshore wind assets. Key considerations are in developing maintenance programmes and evaluating cost and production improvement opportunities relating to asset function and performance. More and more of these opportunities are in finding remote digital solutions to traditionally manual and labour-intensive tasks.
Thomas Helfer (TH): My role as a Senior Operations Engineer within Equinor’s Renewable Energy digitalisation team sees me combining operational knowledge and digital knowledge to develop new, innovative, solutions for operational (and under-development) offshore wind farms.
In offshore wind the main cost is associated with the remote locations of the Wind Turbine Generators (WTGs). This creates a large opportunity space in predictive and prescriptive maintenance, as well as technologies that reduce response times.
As one of Equinor’s Digital Project leaders, I am involved in projects throughout the value chain including data storage and access, developing machine learning algorithms and implementing standardised visualisations. These are all vital building blocks to enable a more data-driven assessment of asset health, both for engineers and leaders.
Q: What are the main challenges you have faced implementing digital tools to support the reliability of equipment or infrastructure?
HG: From my perspective technology maturity is one of the main challenges implementing digital tools. The opportunities are fairly well identified but the technological solutions aren’t necessarily at a maturity level ready for wider implementation. There is also sometimes a disconnect between the technology developers and the end users, so the solutions don’t give all the necessary benefits to justify the investment and implementation.
TH: I will describe two main challenges:
- The human factor. Digital projects are viewed with hype and expectations, but fundamental change management is often forgotten. Adopting an ‘agile’ or “human-centred design” principal to your project can sound like boring common sense but digital projects are rarely implemented with the human end-users in mind. As a result, it is easy to create many half-finished “pet-projects”, but few tools that are regularly used.
- The complexity of the underlying data foundations. There are millions of data signals, but very few are well documented, easily available to end-users and monitored to ensure their quality. This takes time and cost; securing resources from leaders who need ‘quick wins’ and who measure success by financial value is an ongoing challenge. A lack of easy-available signals means using the data becomes very difficult and reliant on specialists, who are in very limited supply!
Q: What is the most exciting data-driven development in the field of reliability at the moment?
HG: In my opinion digital twin concepts are the most exciting data driven development. The ability to use real time data to predict load response and adjust accordingly to prolong asset life or share the load more evenly across the field would be a big step-change in the way wind farm output and performance are managed. Even just being able to calculate remaining useful life across components and assets to proactively predict end of life and optimise maintenance accordingly could have a dramatic impact on lifetime maintenance costs.
TH: Central monitoring centres using assistive machine learning. We can easily combine all data from different systems in one place, visualise it to enable decision making and use machine learning to detect potential failures before humans can. We are waking up to the power of data, and with resourced projects we are seeing step-changes in capabilities.
Q: What are you hoping to address with your presentation at the seminar?
HG: We are hoping to address the importance of data in driving reliability and safe, cost-efficient operations in the offshore wind environment.
TH: Share some of the success I have observed, which is applicable across most industries, but also share some of the issues I have encountered. I hope to be able to breakdown some of the jargon and buzzwords in an understandable manner to help raise awareness of the potential within this field. Hopefully people feel more aware of the digitalisation potential for asset reliability and have a greater understanding of steps required to achieve success.
Q: Which other speakers and topics on the programme are you most looking forward to, and why?
HG: I am looking forward to the morning keynote presentation on “Asking the Right Questions to Get the Right Answers”. I think it is so important to ensure that the critical information is identified, both so that the right data is collected and made available to maximise the intended benefits, and so that unnecessary data can be minimised. Starting with the end in mind!
TH: There are many interesting speakers from both similar and very different industries. The range of roles includes senior leaders and those with more hands-on experience. Tim Flower, as Head of Maintenance for Network Rail, could be one to learn from. Maintenance of the rail network can quickly become a newsworthy issue if enacted wrong, they have a large scale and there’s a constant pressure to reduce disruption to services.
Q: Why should a mechanical engineer attend a seminar on digitalisation?
HG: A seminar on digitalisation is very relevant to a mechanical engineer because the future is digital. Many of today’s problems and improvements throughout the engineering value chain have digital solutions.
TH: Digitalisation is one of those few buzzwords that entraps entire industries and many people believe will transform how services are delivered. Fundamentally, it is an enabler which should help us do what we already do better. There is however a lack of understanding of value, and a shortage of engineers who can speak confidently about their discipline and how their discipline could work better in a more digital future. Digitalisation is also an area which is comparably new, and seminars are a great place to learn from each other.
Q: What innovations are you most interested in for the future?
HG: I’m most interested in the developments in AI and machine learning to maximise the value of the data we collect by gaining better actionable insights.
TH: Robotic and autonomous systems are a huge opportunity for an industry which is remote and getting further offshore. We are very close technologically to being able to have a system which detects erroneous behaviour, investigates through a remotely operated vehicle or autonomous underwater vehicle, self-diagnose the problem and resolve it without any human intervention (except maybe a summary report!). The cost and safety implications are huge.
Asset Management: Reliability for a Digital Age takes place on 26 March 2020 at One Birdcage Walk in London.
- Learn about the application of data analytics to support design, operation, maintenance and life extension decisions
- Hear more about developments in digital asset management tools including digital twins to leverage large volumes of data and upgrade the reliability of your assets
- Benefit from a wide range of industry case studies from the aviation, power distribution, rail infrastructure, nuclear and renewable energy sectors
- Take part in peer-to-peer roundtables to set the tone for discussion and develop solutions for critical challenges
- Enjoy networking time throughout the day to meet new partners and build relationships which will drive your business forwards.
To book your place, please visit www.imeche.org/assetmanagement.