Indeximate has demonstrated its fibre optic cable health monitoring technology on RWE’s subsea power cables at the Arkona offshore wind farm in the Baltic Sea, using its proprietary Scattersphere platform to track cable integrity and predict potential failures.
The UK-based company said the work followed its success in RWE’s 2023 Innovation Competition and involved six months of continuous monitoring over winter 2024–25, covering two cable strings serving 13 turbines.
Indeximate’s system uses existing optical fibres embedded within subsea cables to collect and interpret distributed acoustic sensing data, enabling the continuous assessment of strain, abrasion and vibration between the seabed and the monopile hang-off point – areas traditionally difficult to monitor.
Dynamic strain readings were captured 2000 times per second at 10m intervals along the cables and processed in real time using Indeximate’s proprietary Indeximation technology before being uploaded to its cloud-based Scattersphere analytics portal.
Automated data analysis identified movement, abrasion and fatigue patterns when compared against wave and wind data, allowing the company to map how the cables behaved under specific conditions, such as seven-metre waves and shifting seabed forces.
Indeximate director Dr Chris Minto said: “Our proprietary data compression and analysis technologies are unlocking vital insight into cable health that previously was unavailable to operators and allows us to establish health and risk profiles for all subsea power cables, helping operators avoid repair costs. We are hugely proud of our work with RWE to provide a clearer view of the condition of their cables at the Arkona wind farm in the hard to inspect regions inside the monopile and through the CPS, showing how weather variations effect cable health.”
RWE offshore wind head of innovation and industrialisation Anika Borm-Schmelcher said: “We have been impressed by the work Indeximate delivered to monitor our cables at our Arkona offshore wind farm. Since participating in RWE’s Innovation Competition in 2023, Indeximate and their data processing and monitoring technologies have further developed and now demonstrated their potential to deliver insight on our assets and to exploit the cloud-based resource for multiple approaches beyond cable health. The solution might finally enable RWE to better forecast the health of seabed power cables and, further in the future, to monitor the working environment of our offshore wind farms.”
Indeximate said its Scattersphere platform uses advanced data compression and trend analysis to create long-term risk profiles, enabling operators to predict cable performance, understand remaining lifespan and prevent costly downtime.
The company added that its work with RWE demonstrates how fibre sensing and cloud analytics can provide operators with new levels of visibility into subsea cable health, environmental interaction and long-term structural behaviour.