The power of Fibre Optics
The Insensys Strain Sensing System is perfectly optimised for use in harsh environments-
+ Minimal maintenance – System has no moving parts
+ Fit and forget – Designed to last the lifetime of a turbine (25 years)
+ Immune to electrical (EMI) interference – No electronics in the blade, just fibre optics
+ Lightning safe
+ Durable – Immune to fatigue
+ Low impact – Fast, simple sensor integration into your blade production process
Offshore and Onshore Wind
IPC (Individual Pitch Control)
• A blade load measurement system that allows turbine loads to be reduced.
Individual Pitch Control (IPC) takes readings from the Insensys Blade Sensing System to understand the loads on each blade. It does this at high enough frequency to adjust the blade pitch to reduce peak loads within each blade rotation.
It has been demonstrated that IPC using the Insensys blade sensing system can significantly reduce loads on the rotor and key structural components, providing reductions of 10-20% in the blades, 20-30% in the main shaft and considerably reducing tower and yaw bearing loads.
• Other benefits of IPC reducing peak loads include:
+ Rotor diameters can increase for higher energy yield
+ Existing turbines can improve their wind class
+ Improves reliability and MTBF
+ Reduce output power fluctuations
+ Improve power stability of the grid
• Further applications currently in development, particularly suited for onshore wind:
+ Simplified and lower cost sensing systems for onshore turbines
+ Condition monitoring applications, and enhancing existing cyclic pitch control benefits and identify issues such as Blade Pitch Angle misalignment cause by unreliable pitch encoders
+ Extreme load events alarms
+ Vibration analysis
With our success in the Wind market we are able to invest further in developing our core technology for new markets, and in the next phase of the business (Insensys 3.0) we are looking forward to continuing our Wind business development, and to innovating optical sensing solutions to challenges in other markets.
FUTURE MARKETS