ORE Catapult Visit in Glasgow
I had the pleasure of visiting the Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult, Glasgow office from 20-24 November, 2018. This visit was the result of an invitation from the ORE Catapult team members during the previous Aura Catchup in October, 2018 for visiting their office and getting some useful and productive output as a result of the visit. During the visit, I had the opportunity to interact and network with some senior and experienced professionals in the Offshore Renewable Industry, including Peter MacDonald, Conaill Soraghan, and the team consisting of graduate engineers and data scientists.
During the visit, I had the opportunity to understand many key issues and challenges which the Offshore Wind Industry is facing presently. As I don't come from the Wind Energy background, it was useful and really beneficial for me to interact with people at ORE Catapult, discuss basic physics of Wind Turbines and the turbine components and understand how failures in turbines lead to an enormous downtime and increase in O&M cost. I also got the opportunity to work in the office hot desks at Catapult for the remaining time of my visit. ORE Catapult's Platform for Operational Data (POD) presently has the resources of Supervisory Control and Acquisition (SCADA) data from the 7 MW Levenmouth Demonstration Turbine (LDT) and it is being used by many researchers for understanding and optimising the O&M of Offshore Wind Turbines. I had the opportunity to discuss with the Catapult team the prospective issues which can be addressed possibly, employing Machine Learning and Deep Learning to SCADA data from the LDT. Moreover, the Catapult team were happy to hear about my research topic and possible research questions I would like to address during my PhD.
This visit gave me an opportunity to build my confidence and I now feel better equipped, both personally and professionally to go further in my PhD. I am grateful to Aura for organising my visit and to Catapult for hosting me for this productive week. I am also thankful to my Supervisor Nina and the entire BDA group for encouraging me to move forward for such endeavours. As a result of the collaboration between Aura and ORE Catapult, there will be several opportunities to network with the ORE Catapult in the near future. Last but not the least, we had a lovely group photograph with Conaill and some of his team, to end the visit on an extremely positive note.