Approach
The chosen approach was to develop upon an existing MATLAB program which roughly estimated the operations and maintenance activities for a yearly period for a given offshore wind farm and the consequent energy demand. The developments were identified with the aim of calculating the total energy consumption for each part of the hydrogen production process and compare this with the energy produced over a year by the wind farm.
To achieve this aim the following steps were taken.
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Literature review: Conducted a comprehensive review of literature on Offshore Wind Farms, Predictive Maintenance schedules, Desalination and Hydrogen Storage technologies. This involved gathering information from various academic and industry sources, analyzing and synthesizing the information, and identifying relevant trends and gaps in the literature. =
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MATLAB tool development: A MATLAB tool was developed upon to include: An estimated energy production based on a Weibull Distribution and the energy consumed by the hydrogen production process of desalination, PEM Electrolysis, and compression to storage conditions. Furthermore, the tool was developed to include categorization of failure types into minor and minor and a consequent vessel selection.
From this, the size of equipment required for this type of process for a given site was also calculated by the tool.
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Tool validation and feasibility evaluation: The accuracy of the tool was validated by comparing its predictions with real-world sites and evaluating its performance against existing values in the literature. Based on the outputs of the tool, the size and feasibility of a hydrogen production process was estimated for three existing offshore wind farms based on the tool's predictions and recommendations.
This is the figure shows our approach was to develop a tool using MATLAB to:
This is the figure shows our program execution:
