Early-Warning Indicators of Power Cable Weaknesses for Offshore Wind Farms

Abstract

Renewable energy is becoming an important way to generate energy with a much smaller impact on the global environment. Wind power is one of the most prevalent renewable energy forms and is gaining popularity globally. Offshore wind power cables are usually burned deep in the sea bottom and an accurate fault detection and localization, very important to ensure the reliability of the power supply, is very difficult. For this reason, the maintenance and diagnostic of the cable systems are very important tasks in order to reduce the cost and increase security, reliability and quality of electricity supplied from offshore generation systems. In this paper we propose a way to detect the weaknesses in the cables that, without any maintenance, could conduct to faults of offshore wind farm network cable systems. Our approach takes the advantages of the phase diagram-based signal processing to quantify the changes that occur in the offshore wind power cables state when the transients corresponding to the weaknesses happens.