EMEC joins ORCHIDS research project

Orkney’s European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) has joined forces with Fraunhofer UK and Synaptec to develop a solution to cable and electrical infrastructure integrity within the marine renewable energy industry.

The ORCHIDS project (Offshore Renewable energy Cable Health monitoring using Integrated Distributed Sensor systems) is being funded by the UK government’s business innovation experts InnovateUK.

“Subsea cable health is a particular challenge for marine energy and offshore renewables due to the hostile environment in which they are placed and have to operate,” said InnovateUK’s David Hytch.

“Failure of cables can also lead to costly losses of revenue and hefty repair bills.”

The project is looking to enhance subsea cable monitoring capabilities by combining emerging optical sensing techniques to enable a smart cable management system that can be utilised during manufacture, transport, installation, through to end of life.

The feasibility study will include a market assessment looking at the commercial case for the technology, alongside a technical review of different distributed fibre sensing techniques.