Page 61: of Offshore Engineer Magazine (Nov/Dec 2022)

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TECH FEATURE DIGITALIZATION ecessity is the mother invention, and Miros started in 1984 as a ‘geeky science project’ to provide better sea state data for platforms in the North Sea – which at the time relied on

N buoys; buoys that provided good data but were ‘mainte- nance hungry.’

Born was a solution that was nurtured with the Norwe- gian national oil company Statoil (now Equinor), to create “the ?rst prototypes of this wave radar, which was put on oil producing platforms in Norway and gave the same param- eters as wave buoy would give out,” said Røstad in an inter- view at the company’s Oslo headquarters earlier this year.

Nearly four decades later, Miros has evolved into a tech- nology company that specializes in measuring the ocean sur- face, providing sensors and systems for environmental mon- itoring to the offshore and maritime industries, including wave and current monitoring as well as oil spill detection.

MARINE

Ofshore Wind Efciency

TECHNOLOGY “Today, typically, offshore wind projects use weather

Jonas Røstad,

TV forecasts, but what we can do is to give the actual sea state

Watch the interview @

Chief Commercial at any given point,” said Røstad, helping, for example, ves- https://youtu.

sel operators in the offshore wind sector cut wasted vessel be/3fZyS1jP8dk '"!)*$' trips and increase safety. “They start on the trip, and when they get out to the turbine, it turns out that the wave height is too high, so they have to make a U-turn and go back, which can also arrange these sensors right, then we can reduce turbine lead to turbine downtime. What we do is give real-time downtime by 1%.” wave measurement within the [wind farm], and maybe Naturally there are savings to be had on the vessel side, mix it with the weather forecasts. It’s all about maximizing too. In a study with ORE Catapult in 2019, Miros found the weather window.” that by utilizing the data from its wave sensors, CTVs and

In fact, on some really large offshore wind farms with di- SOVs saved up to 5% of fuel and CO2 emissions, too.

verse bathymetry, wave conditions can vary signi?cantly at Studies are one thing, real-world operations another, different points in the wind farm. In such a dynamic and and earlier this year, Subsea 7 awarded Miros Group agree- fast-changing environment, absolute accuracy is always an ments to install its internet of things (IoT) dry-sensor issue, but Røstad points out that Miros’ instruments are WaveSystem on three of its pipelay support vessels to de- “the only DNV-certi?ed wave measurement device(s) on liver accurate wave measurements via Miros’ cloud-based what they call the Alpha factor.” graphical user interface (GUI) Miros.app.

A big value proposition for the Miros solution is the As part of three 3-year contracts and project require- fact that the sensors feeding data to the system are dry- ments for the monitoring of wave and current to a water mounted, not in the sea and directly exposed to saltwater, depth of 10 meters, WaveSystem will be installed on Seven signi?cantly reducing maintenance. Waves, Seven Rio, and Seven Sun vessels, and the deal will

Once installed and operational, they simply shoot the see Subsea 7 gain access to Miros Cloud services delivering data stream up to the cloud, making the information easy to real-time sea state data.

access for anyone with proper credentials. The layout of the On awarding the contract, Filipe Salvio, Operations sensors is unique to each wind farm, dependent ultimately Manager at Subsea 7, said, “the cloud-enabled WaveSystem on the layout of the farm, water depth, and bathymetry. onboard our three pipelay support vessels allows us to deliv- “[Via a pair of case studies] we have found that if we er the best service to our customer independently of offshore november/december 2022 OFFSHORE ENGINEER 61