From The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: “How Fiber-Optic Sensing and New Materials Could Reduce the Cost of Floating Offshore Wind”
From The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
6.1.23
Julie Bobyock
Christina Procopiou
Shake table tests are used to mimic ocean waves and test turbine stability. They also test the ability of fiber optic sensing to measure the response of the turbines. Courtesy of Yuxin Wu.
Researchers are giving floating offshore wind turbines abilities to self-monitor and self-heal.
In shallow waters, offshore wind turbines are fixed to the ocean floor. However, in deep water areas where winds are typically stronger and have the capacity to reap more than double the energy, floating offshore wind turbines must be moored to the seabed where the ocean is too deep for fixed structures. Floating offshore wind (FOSW) is one of the most promising clean energy technologies with a potential market worth nearly $16 billion – but science and technology solutions are needed to help reduce the cost of developing, deploying, and maintaining these complex systems.
Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are developing sensing technologies consisting of fiber-optic cables, which could be installed on FOSW structures that have been planned off the California coast. This would allow structures to self-monitor damaging conditions that could lead to costly repairs and would also help gauge how FOSW impacts marine mammals by detecting their activity.
In collaboration with experts in materials science, engineering, geophysics, and FOSW developers from around the world, Berkeley Lab scientist Yuxin Wu is now working to develop solutions to reduce the cost of FOSW development and deployment, while minimizing potential environmental impacts.
In collaboration with experts in materials science, engineering, geophysics, and FOSW developers from around the world, Berkeley Lab scientist Yuxin Wu is now working to develop solutions to reduce the cost of FOSW development and deployment, while minimizing potential environmental impacts.
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Q. What is the biggest obstacle to expanding floating offshore wind technologies?
Wu: So far, there have been few FOSW deployments because the technology is in the early stages of development. Currently, no such systems have been deployed anywhere near 1000 meters in depth. We want to leverage scientific innovation by co-designing structural materials that are better able to withstand harsh marine environments and extreme weather events. And we want to add distributed fiber optic sensing to FOSW systems to enable systems to self monitor in real time for potential problems, a capability that could prolong a system’s lifespan and lower operating and maintenance costs.
Q. How does your team apply fiber-optic sensing to these innovations?
Wu: A fiber cable has a glass core that allows you to send an optical signal at the speed of light; when there is any vibration, strain, or change in temperature of the material that is being monitored, that information will be carried in the light signal that is scattered back. When attached to or embedded within the wind turbine structure, this gives it a “nervous system” which allows it to “hear” and “feel.” The fiber is able to monitor surrounding acoustic signals, such as whale calls, which can help scientists assess potential impacts to large marine mammals from FOSW operations.
We’ve been testing the deployment of this sensing technology to structural components – such as towers and turbines – to monitor physical and mechanical conditions experienced by the structure itself, like temperature or strain. Our research so far has focused on testing fiber optics on the tower and gearbox, some of the most expensive components where there is benefit to identifying damage before it leads to problems.
Credit: https://environmentamerica.org
Q. How important is materials science to reducing the cost of floating offshore wind systems?
Wu: By revealing what is happening within a FOSW system in real time, fiber-optic sensing gives us the knowledge needed to develop more resilient, cost-effective materials at the system level. Designing FOSW systems at lower cost and to withstand harsh marine environments requires cutting-edge materials science combined with computing science to produce better materials and to effectively simulate how the materials perform. Materials can be developed to give the structures self-healing capabilities; for example, seawater intruding into a crack in concrete triggers reactions to seal the crack without interventions.
We are partnering with experts in materials science and simulations from the molecular to structural scale to bring about innovations that have great potential for future deep-water floating systems because of their large cost-saving potential, local producibility, better performance, and environmental sustainability. DOE user facilities at Berkeley Lab, such as the Molecular Foundry, Advanced Light Source, and National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, play key roles in facilitating innovations in our research.
Q. These systems are far offshore, making them challenging to access for maintenance. How can technology help track and predict their performance when people aren’t nearby to monitor operations?
Wu: Digital twins are representations of structures made using advanced computer modeling, often jointly with real-time monitoring data, that scientists can use to control, simulate, and monitor how the FOSW system would respond to different weather or marine conditions. For example, we can simulate conditions of a hurricane and see exactly how the system would function under this extreme weather – right from our desktop computers. With real-time data feeding into the digital twins, system response to actual “on-the-water” field conditions can be monitored to support decision-making, for example when to send a crew to conduct system inspection. This could significantly reduce costs by avoiding unnecessary trips, and by allowing proactive maintenance of the system before larger, expensive failures.
Last summer, our team used shake table testing of an actual turbine at the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center at UC Berkeley’s Richmond Field Station, to test the ability of the fiber optic sensing to monitor how the turbines would respond to wave movements far offshore. The shake test helps evaluate and optimize deployment of sensors which eventually will be sitting on structures in the middle of the ocean and autonomously communicating data to land via fiber cables.
Turbine testing at the Richmond Field Station. (Credit: Courtesy of Yuxin Wu)
Q. How important is collaboration to reducing the cost of floating offshore wind?
Wu: DOE’s floating offshore wind earthshot has an ambitious goal of 70% cost reduction by 2035. This requires a system-level approach that optimizes all steps through the entire lifecycle of FOSW from material design, structural construction, deployment, operation, and maintenance. Partnering with institutions and industries with different expertise allows us to efficiently develop these new and complex technologies that can help shift the nation’s energy economy to one built on clean, renewable sources.
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Bringing Science Solutions to the World
In the world of science, The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is synonymous with “excellence.” Thirteen Nobel prizes are associated with Berkeley Lab. Seventy Lab scientists are members of the The National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors for a scientist in the United States. Thirteen of our scientists have won the National Medal of Science, our nation’s highest award for lifetime achievement in fields of scientific research. Eighteen of our engineers have been elected to the The National Academy of Engineering, and three of our scientists have been elected into The Institute of Medicine. In addition, Berkeley Lab has trained thousands of university science and engineering students who are advancing technological innovations across the nation and around the world.
Berkeley Lab is a member of the national laboratory system supported by The DOE through its Office of Science. It is managed by the University of California and is charged with conducting unclassified research across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Located on a 202-acre site in the hills above The University of California-Berkeley campus that offers spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay, Berkeley Lab employs approximately 3,232 scientists, engineers and support staff. The Lab’s total costs for FY 2014 were $785 million. A recent study estimates the Laboratory’s overall economic impact through direct, indirect and induced spending on the nine counties that make up the San Francisco Bay Area to be nearly $700 million annually. The Lab was also responsible for creating 5,600 jobs locally and 12,000 nationally. The overall economic impact on the national economy is estimated at $1.6 billion a year. Technologies developed at Berkeley Lab have generated billions of dollars in revenues, and thousands of jobs. Savings as a result of Berkeley Lab developments in lighting and windows, and other energy-efficient technologies, have also been in the billions of dollars.
Berkeley Lab was founded in 1931 by Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a University of California-Berkeley physicist who won the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the cyclotron, a circular particle accelerator that opened the door to high-energy physics. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab legacy that continues today.
History
1931–1941
The laboratory was founded on August 26, 1931, by Ernest Lawrence, as the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California-Berkeley, associated with the Physics Department. It centered physics research around his new instrument, the cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939.
LBNL 88 inch cyclotron.
Throughout the 1930s, Lawrence pushed to create larger and larger machines for physics research, courting private philanthropists for funding. He was the first to develop a large team to build big projects to make discoveries in basic research. Eventually these machines grew too large to be held on the university grounds, and in 1940 the lab moved to its current site atop the hill above campus. Part of the team put together during this period includes two other young scientists who went on to establish large laboratories; J. Robert Oppenheimer founded The DOE’s Los Alamos Laboratory, and Robert Wilson founded The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
1942–1950
Leslie Groves visited Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory in late 1942 as he was organizing the Manhattan Project, meeting J. Robert Oppenheimer for the first time. Oppenheimer was tasked with organizing the nuclear bomb development effort and founded today’s Los Alamos National Laboratory to help keep the work secret. At the RadLab, Lawrence and his colleagues developed the technique of electromagnetic enrichment of uranium using their experience with cyclotrons. The “calutrons” (named after the University) became the basic unit of the massive Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Lawrence’s lab helped contribute to what have been judged to be the three most valuable technology developments of the war (the atomic bomb, proximity fuse, and radar). The cyclotron, whose construction was stalled during the war, was finished in November 1946. The Manhattan Project shut down two months later.
1951–2018
After the war, the Radiation Laboratory became one of the first laboratories to be incorporated into the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) (now The Department of Energy . The most highly classified work remained at Los Alamos, but the RadLab remained involved. Edward Teller suggested setting up a second lab similar to Los Alamos to compete with their designs. This led to the creation of an offshoot of the RadLab (now The DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) in 1952. Some of the RadLab’s work was transferred to the new lab, but some classified research continued at Berkeley Lab until the 1970s, when it became a laboratory dedicated only to unclassified scientific research.
Shortly after the death of Lawrence in August 1958, the UC Radiation Laboratory (both branches) was renamed the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. The Berkeley location became the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1971, although many continued to call it the RadLab. Gradually, another shortened form came into common usage, LBNL. Its formal name was amended to Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1995, when “National” was added to the names of all DOE labs. “Ernest Orlando” was later dropped to shorten the name. Today, the lab is commonly referred to as “Berkeley Lab”.
The Alvarez Physics Memos are a set of informal working papers of the large group of physicists, engineers, computer programmers, and technicians led by Luis W. Alvarez from the early 1950s until his death in 1988. Over 1700 memos are available on-line, hosted by the Laboratory.
The lab remains owned by the Department of Energy , with management from the University of California. Companies such as Intel were funding the lab’s research into computing chips.
Science mission
From the 1950s through the present, Berkeley Lab has maintained its status as a major international center for physics research, and has also diversified its research program into almost every realm of scientific investigation. Its mission is to solve the most pressing and profound scientific problems facing humanity, conduct basic research for a secure energy future, understand living systems to improve the environment, health, and energy supply, understand matter and energy in the universe, build and safely operate leading scientific facilities for the nation, and train the next generation of scientists and engineers.
The Laboratory’s 20 scientific divisions are organized within six areas of research: Computing Sciences; Physical Sciences; Earth and Environmental Sciences; Biosciences; Energy Sciences; and Energy Technologies. Berkeley Lab has six main science thrusts: advancing integrated fundamental energy science; integrative biological and environmental system science; advanced computing for science impact; discovering the fundamental properties of matter and energy; accelerators for the future; and developing energy technology innovations for a sustainable future. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab tradition that continues today.
Berkeley Lab operates five major National User Facilities for the DOE Office of Science:
The Advanced Light Source (ALS) is a synchrotron light source with 41 beam lines providing ultraviolet, soft x-ray, and hard x-ray light to scientific experiments.
The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Advanced Light Source.
The ALS is one of the world’s brightest sources of soft x-rays, which are used to characterize the electronic structure of matter and to reveal microscopic structures with elemental and chemical specificity. About 2,500 scientist-users carry out research at ALS every year. Berkeley Lab is proposing an upgrade of ALS which would increase the coherent flux of soft x-rays by two-three orders of magnitude.
Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center
The DOE Joint Genome Institute supports genomic research in support of the DOE missions in alternative energy, global carbon cycling, and environmental management. The JGI’s partner laboratories are Berkeley Lab, DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology . The JGI’s central role is the development of a diversity of large-scale experimental and computational capabilities to link sequence to biological insights relevant to energy and environmental research. Approximately 1,200 scientist-users take advantage of JGI’s capabilities for their research every year.
The LBNL Molecular Foundry is a multidisciplinary nanoscience research facility. Its seven research facilities focus on Imaging and Manipulation of Nanostructures; Nanofabrication; Theory of Nanostructured Materials; Inorganic Nanostructures; Biological Nanostructures; Organic and Macromolecular Synthesis; and Electron Microscopy. Approximately 700 scientist-users make use of these facilities in their research every year.
The DOE’s NERSC National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center is the scientific computing facility that provides large-scale computing for the DOE’s unclassified research programs. Its current systems provide over 3 billion computational hours annually. NERSC supports 6,000 scientific users from universities, national laboratories, and industry.
DOE’s NERSC National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Cray Cori II supercomputer at National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, named after Gerty Cori, the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in science.
NERSC Hopper Cray XE6 supercomputer.
The Genepool system is a cluster dedicated to the DOE Joint Genome Institute’s computing needs. Denovo is a smaller test system for Genepool that is primarily used by NERSC staff to test new system configurations and software.
NERSC PDSF computer cluster in 2003.
PDSF is a networked distributed computing cluster designed primarily to meet the detector simulation and data analysis requirements of physics, astrophysics and nuclear science collaborations.
Cray Shasta Perlmutter SC18 AMD Epyc Nvidia pre-exascale supercomputer.
NERSC is a DOE Office of Science User Facility.
The DOE’s Energy Science Network is a high-speed network infrastructure optimized for very large scientific data flows. ESNet provides connectivity for all major DOE sites and facilities, and the network transports roughly 35 petabytes of traffic each month.
Berkeley Lab is the lead partner in the DOE’s Joint Bioenergy Institute (JBEI), located in Emeryville, California. Other partners are the DOE’s Sandia National Laboratory, the University of California (UC) campuses of Berkeley and Davis, the Carnegie Institution for Science , and DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). JBEI’s primary scientific mission is to advance the development of the next generation of biofuels – liquid fuels derived from the solar energy stored in plant biomass. JBEI is one of three new U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Research Centers (BRCs).
Berkeley Lab has a major role in two DOE Energy Innovation Hubs. The mission of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) is to find a cost-effective method to produce fuels using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. The lead institution for JCAP is the California Institute of Technology and Berkeley Lab is the second institutional center. The mission of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) is to create next-generation battery technologies that will transform transportation and the electricity grid. DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory leads JCESR and Berkeley Lab is a major partner.
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