Session: 09-08-03 Floating Solar: Loads and Responses

Submission Number: 181956

Autoencoder-Based Mooring Damage Detection in a Soft-Connected Offshore Floating Photovoltaic System 

Energy production from solar energy is widely regarded as a promising solution in the global transition towards sustainable energy sources.  However, the utility-scale ground-mounted photovoltaic (PV) installations require substantial land areas, raising significant ecological and socio-economic concerns. Due to this limitation and to meet the global energy demand, there has been a growing research interest in offshore floating photovoltaic systems due to the abundant space. Typical offshore floating solar platforms consist of multiple connected bodies subjected to the harsh and dynamic offshore environment. The large wave-induced hydrodynamic forces on the multibody structures raise critical concerns regarding the safety, durability, and operational reliability of such systems. During operation, monitoring of every interconnection and mooring line is often impractical due to technical and economic constraints. This paper studies the method to detect damage in the mooring lines based on the time-domain platform motion of a soft-connected FPV system. A Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) autoencoder model is trained with numerical time-domain motion response data from SIMO to calculate the reconstruction error of float motion. The proposed method aims to enhance the structural design while reducing the reliance on extensive sensor networks, contributing to the safe and cost-effective deployment and operation of offshore floating solar technologies.

Presenting Author: Jenish Baniya OsloMet – Oslo Metropolitan University

Presenting Author Biography: I am PhD Candiate at Oslo Metropolitan University working on multibody offshore FPV system.

Authors:

Jenish Baniya OsloMet – Oslo Metropolitan University
Jian Dai Oslomet - Oslo Metropolitan University
Zhiyu Jiang University of Agder
Chi Zhang Technology Centre for Offshore and Marine (TCOMS)