A Contibution to the Diagnosis of Submarine Power Cables Using Model-Based Approach

This paper deals with the diagnosis of submarine power cables deployed between a wind turbine floating platform and its seabed electrical substation. These so-called dynamic cables are several hundred meters in length and are subjected to a lifelong motion from the floating structure, waves and marine currents. Another important factor which may greatly affect its hydrodynamic drag and cooling is the undesirable accumulation of biological organisms called either biofouling. Therefore, the diagnosis of these dynamic cables represents nowadays a key issue for the development of floating offshore wind farms. Since 2011, floating technology offers many authentic advantages; In fact wind turbines can be installed in areas of high winds and in deep seas far from the coastline, which represent a promising technology for developing the renewable marine energies. In this paper, we investigate the online diagnosis of dynamic power cables by the model-based approach. The guiding principle is to monitor the R-L-C parameters of a cable transmission line modeling order to diagnose problems such as cable overheating, water-treeing or water ingress. Then, the main challenge is to find the “best” parametric model which must present the best tradeoff between structure complexity for diagnosis ability and simplicity for its identifiability in operating conditions. For this, we use the parametric sensibility analysis to evaluate the diagnosis potential of some diagnostic-dedicated models. First results are promising.