ORE Catapult (https://ore.catapult.org.uk) is the UK's leading technology innovation and research centre for offshore renewable energy. ORE Catapult's vision is to be the world's leading offshore renewable energy technology centre by 2030. ORE Catapult will play a key role in delivering the UK's largest clean growth opportunity, through our mission to accelerate the creation and growth of UK companies in the offshore renewable energy sector. We will use our unique facilities and research and engineering capabilities to bring together industry and academia and drive innovation in renewable energy.
The Multi-Platform Inspection, Maintenance & Repair in extreme environments ("MIMRee") project (https://ore.catapult.org.uk/press-releases/mimree-inspection-repair-solution/) has been funded by Innovate UK and its aim is to provide a step-change in offshore wind farm Operations & Maintenance ("O&M") by removing the requirement for humans to travel to site for the inspection, maintenance and repair of offshore wind turbine blades. This will significantly reduce the costs and turbine downtime associated with these tasks, as well as mitigate the H&S risks of using rope access technicians.
As the partner responsible for testing and demonstration within the project, ORE Catapult is seeking to procure a solution for a simulated testing environment, denoted as the Synthetic Test and Unified Demonstration System (STUDS).
The capabilities of the STUDS can be summarised to:
a Enable and verify timely and effective communication to each of the sub-system components;
b Provide a common simulated "environment" with scenarios that can interact with, stimulate and record responses in connected sub-systems;
c Enable sub-system validation;
d Provide a growth path that enables the simultaneous connection of all subsystems to a common "end-to-end" simulation that can validate the decision-making at each of the interfaces (take off/landing of the aerial vehicle, drop-off/collection of the blade crawling robot) in different environmental and operational conditions.
Utilising results of the testing in the STUDS, ORE Catapult will provide feedback to the project partners to advance their technology development and system interoperability. see scope of work for further details. Delivery of the system is no later than 14 May 2021.
All tender document can be found at https://procontract.due-north.com;
Search for project reference number DN508022