The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has secured funding from the California Energy Commission to carry out research into the use of fibre optic cables as sensors in the offshore wind sector.
Finance totalling $2m has been provided for the project, which will be in collaboration with UC Berkeley.
The lab said that off the California coast, the ocean floor drops off steeply, making floating wind turbines the only viable option.
However, this technology faces several obstacles, including how to do maintenance and operations on remote installations in the ocean economically and how to monitor if hazards such as earthquakes or extreme weather conditions disrupt operations.
Fibre optic cables could help with these issues, the lab said.
Berkeley Lab geophysics department head Yuxin Wu said: “One of the most expensive components of a wind turbine is the gearbox; they also tend to be the part that’s most vulnerable to failure.
“Often before they fail they produce abnormal vibrations or excessive heat due to increased or irregular friction.
“We intend to use fibre optic cables to monitor the vibrational, strain, and temperature signal of the gearbox, in order to pinpoint where problems are happening.”
Wrapping fibre optic cables around the entire gearbox can provide a 3D map of changes with resolution at the millimetre scale.
Wu said: “It could help identify problems with the gearbox at an early stage, which would trigger emergency management, before a catastrophic failure causing loss of the whole turbine.”
The project also intends to explore how the fibre optic cables can be used to detect marine mammal activity.
The sensitivity of the fibre signal could allow for differentiation between, for example, crashing waves and a pod of whales swimming nearby.
Wu said: “Environmentally sustainable development of offshore wind is critical,” he said. “With a large offshore wind farm, there would be many of these mooring lines securing the turbine structures to the ocean floor.
“If a humpback whale swims by, what are the impacts of these mooring lines on their activities?
“Will the whales generate unique vibrational signals that can be picked up by the fiber optic sensors?
“If we can track the signals of a whale swimming by, it will allow us to evaluate whether and how the offshore wind turbine impacts marine mammals.”