UK Launches Subsea Cable Monitoring Project

The National Oceanography Centre in the UK is leading a project to improve the operational efficiency of offshore renewable energy generation by addressing failure management of submarine cables.

The Submarine High-fidelity Active-monitoring of Renewable energy Cables (SHARC) project has received support from Innovate UK’s Sustainable Innovation Fund.

Between 2014 and 2017, recorded cable failures across UK sites alone led to a cumulative loss of £227m, highlighting the importance of innovations to improve cable failure-management strategies.

The SHARC project will develop techniques to monitor the condition of cables in real-time, taking into account the combined influence of various marine environmental and intrinsic cable heating effects.

This will result in early detection of potential threats to cables or better prediction of their potential failures, which will enable timely intervention and reducing downtime, NOC said.

In the project NOC is leading a team of experts from the fields of marine geoscience, next-generation distributed fibre optics design and instrumentation, ocean technology and engineering, machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithm design, and exploitation and modelling of dynamic and static cable rating.

The European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) is the project end-user and key stakeholder.

NOC SHARC project lead Mohammad Belal said the SHARC project has the potential to avert and address potential damage before it’s too late, by which time it becomes incredibly expensive to repair.

Belal added: “The societal benefits that SHARC will contribute to are also significant in terms of the more efficient generation of clean, renewable energy, reducing the risk to people operating in this sector, with concurrent monitoring of the precious oceanic environment."