Indeximate Demonstrates Cable Health Monitoring Technology on RWE Subsea Power Cables
Indeximate, a provider of fiber sensing-based cable health monitoring to the offshore wind energy industry, announced that it has demonstrated its cable health monitoring to the offshore wind farm operator RWE. Following their success in RWE’s 2023 innovation competition, over winter 2024-25, Indeximate’s proprietary Scattersphere technology provided continuous health monitoring tracking and analysis of two strings at Arkona offshore wind farm in the Baltic Sea, covering 13 turbines.
Indeximate’s technology leverages existing optical fibers that commonly exist in subsea power cables to collect and automatically interpret distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) data. The monitoring and analysis included key areas of the cable protection system (CPS) between touchdown and aperture, as well as inside the monopile from aperture to hang off where installation of sensors for monitoring has long been a legacy issue for the sector.
Over the six-month period, data was collected on the cables as they were subject to typical winter storm conditions, the effects of gravity and 7-meter-high waves. Dynamic strain measurements from DAS were taken 2,000 times per second at 10m intervals along the cables. Indeximate compressed the raw data in real time using its proprietary Indeximation technology, uploaded to their cloud portal, the Scattersphere, where automated analytics extracted several long-term risk profiles for the cable including abrasion, strain, fatigue integrity and vibration.
Automated analysis of the data identified signatures related to cable movement, abrasion and vibration, as well as fatigue and damage. Analysed alongside co-registered wave and wind data, the long-term data record allows Indeximate to observe how the cables behaved in certain conditions, such as directional weather and specific wave heights and identify where issues may emerge. These insights have the potential to identify points of failure in advance, providing time for O&M teams to develop approaches to mitigate issues and avoid disruption and downtime, that can cost operators millions.
Indeximate uses industry-leading proprietary data compression technology to enable the analysis of petabytes of long-term DAS data collected using optical fibers that commonly exist as part of subsea power cables, in Indeximate’s cable health monitoring Scattersphere technology.
Historical pattern and trend analysis allows the creation of years-long risk profiles, which enable cable operators to continuously assess risks to assets, understand remaining life and benefit from early warning and detection of cable flaws. New fiber sensing and data compression approaches are enabling the offshore wind industry to reevaluate cable monitoring and the extent of insights that can be gathered on cable health, environment and the water column.