Wind 360 – IOT and Analytics for Energy – Wind Turbines

The IBM Insights Foundation for Energy WIND360 application provides an advisor for wind farm operations and maintenance.

The Wind 360 application integrates wind farm operational systems to deliver a business driven solution. The application leverages predictive, prescriptive, and cognitive solutions with mobile technology to improve wind farm operation and maintenance efficiency.

The application user interface is composed of four parts:

• Filter bar - to filter assets for different criteria, e.g. status, asset class, geography.
• Task bar - to show or hide the filter bar, legend panel, or switch between the content to map, list or report view.
• Content area - to visualize differing approaches of assets, including map, list, and report views.
• Legend panel - to show the different asset classes and the score ranges the representative colors.

Figure 1. User interface

• Logging on to the Asset Health application

Log on to access the IBM Insights Foundation for Energy user interface.

• Task bar

The task bar contains the controls for how the various panels and filter options show in user interface.

• Filter bar

The filter bar contains the controls to filter assets for different criteria, e.g. status, asset class, geography.

• Viewing assets on a map

Assets and their connections within the energy network can be seen on a geographic map. Depending on the zoom level, either individual assets and their health, or an aggregation of assets and the health of the combined assets are displayed.

• Viewing assets as a list

Assets and their network health and risk values can be displayed as a list.

• Filtering assets

The assets displayed on the map or list can be filtered based on selected criteria.

• Using the Connectivity Model

The Connectivity Model gives feedback to managers, data analysts and grid operators as to the accuracy of the phase and connectivity details of the network.

• Viewing asset reports

You can view detailed reports on a single asset or on a group of assets.

• Wind 360 application

The IBM Insights Foundation for Energy WIND360 application provides an advisor for wind farm operations and maintenance.

• Exporting data

After filtering the data to the desired subset, information on the selected assets can be exported for use in other systems.

• Creating input for a rate use case

Using IBM Insights Foundation for Energy, regional planning engineers determine where investment is required to maintain or improve reliability.

 

The Wind 360 application for IBM Foundation for Energy has dashboards that have differing access rights dependent on the user profile.

The key performance indicator dashboard consists of reports that keep the user aware of the current performance of the wind farm without requesting further information. After logging in, the user with KPI Dashboard privileges can view the KPI dashboard and see an overall view of the performance of the wind farm.

Farm KPI report

The KPI report dashboard shows the overall operation index of the wind farm. The index is developed from four dimensions: power production, turbine availability, wind power conversion rate and turbine health. The deputy manager can also see the overall ranking among similar wind farms. The color of the scores represents different ranges: red: <60, yellow: 60-80, green: >=80.

Power Generation report

The Power Generation report shows the power production in MW, loss due to down time in MW and the total lost time compared over a three week period, the previous complete two weeks and current week.

MTBF and MTBR report

MTBF - Mean Time Between Failure

MTTR - Mean Time To Restore

The MTBF and MTBR report shows the comparison between MTBF and MTTR over the previous eight months. The time period can be altered.

Maintenance Cost report

The Maintenance Cost report compares the cost of maintenance of the turbines over the same time period of this year and last year on a monthly basis. You can use the calendar to choose the time period you want to view.

Utilization Hours report

The Utilization Hours report shows the power generated, loss time and utilization hours during the period of time selected from the calendar.

Utilization hour = power generation / turbine full capacity. The Utilization Hours report is the most important KPI for a wind farm.

Weather Forecast report

The Weather Forecast report, shows the weather information such as temperature, wind speed, wind direction, and humidity. You are also provided with maintenance suggestions according to the weather condition. The wind speed shows also for the next 12 hours.

All the weather data is from The Weather Company API.

The operational engineer is responsible for individual turbine and overall farm monitoring. The engineer needs to know the current state of each turbine within the wind farm.

The Map and list views

The Map view shows a visualization of data items associated with their relevant positions on the map. Using the information displayed on the map together with the list view, you can identify location patterns. A score for each turbine indicates the working effectiveness of each turbine.

You can view the basic information for each turbine by hovering over the icon representing the turbine. The hover card shows the turbine serial number, working status, index score, and wind speed. The icon color is consistent with the legend color.

Wind Speed and Direction Trend report

The Wind Speed and Direction Trend report shows the wind condition for the farm. You can hover on it to see the condition for a specific day. The deep blue part of the report represents the past, and the light blue part represents the forecast for the future days.

Farm report

The Farm report shows the three reports:

• Power generation report
• Utilization Hours report
• Turbine Availability report

Turbine report

The Turbine report shows three reports for an individual turbine:

• Turbine KPI report shows the overall operation index for a single turbine. The index is developed from four dimensions: power production, turbine availability, wind power convention rate and turbine health. The color of the scores represents different ranges: red: <60; yellow: 60-80, green: >=80.
• Power curve report shows the actual power curve of the wind turbine compared to the conceptual power curve. If the curves differ greatly, then the turbine is not operating in its optimum state.
• Utilization Hours report shows the utilization hours for a single wind turbine.

Turbine detail report

The Turbine detail report shows three reports:

• Turbine basic information shows the real-time data including active production, wind speed, communication state. The Turbine detail report also shows the turbine type, identification number, installation date, region of installation, wind farm information, and working wind speed.
• Health Degradation report shows the information for health / failure risk and asset details for the major components of the turbine, blade, generator, and transformer.
• Real-Time Monitoring shows 11 real time readings for: Wind Speed, Angle-Blade1, Angle-Blade2, Angle-Blade3, Power At, Turbine Speed, Vibration-X, Vibration-Y, Wind Direction, Yaw Speed, Yaw Wind Direction.

The Maintenance Dashboard for the Wind360 application gives the user an automatic and optimized maintenance plan that takes into consideration differing constraints and goals. The user can review the plan. The user can also action to generate work orders for different maintenance engineers.

• Viewing the KPI dashboard

The KPI Dashboard contains the reports that give an overall view of the performance of the wind farm.

• Viewing map and list views and sorting lists in the monitoring dashboard

The monitoring dashboard shows the operational information for the current sta e of the wind farm