Reliable Load Measurement Systems For Active Control Applications

Insensys was founded in 2002, and provides its customers with fibre optic load measurement systems for Wind Turbine Active Control, Structural Health Monitoring and Test and Measurement applications.

Our products are designed specifically for the Wind Energy market sector to offer high performance and reliability and have been proven through numerous field and bench test comparisons. In this article, the company describes its products, wind energy applications and market expectations

Introduction to Insensys

Insensys is the world’s leading manufacturer of fibre optic measurement solutions serving a range of market sectors including Wind Energy, Oil and Gas to Aerospace.

Insensys was founded in September 2002 by Martin Jones (CEO) and Damon Roberts (VP Engineering). Having been friends for some 10 years but working in very different fields - Damon in the world of composites and fibre optic sensing and Martin from the financial and IT world - they took the decision to combine their talents and develop a business. Their idea was to bring the unique benefits of fibre optic sensing from the preserve of R&D into a robust, practical and reliable commercial system with widespread use.

Insensys Mission

Insensys is focused on providing improvements in the performance, safety and profitability for our customers in the wind energy industry by enabling Advanced Turbine Control and Structural Health Monitoring applications.

We are committed to maintaining our position at the forefront of fibre optic sensing technology by continually developing systems that deliver improved performance and reliability at reduced cost to our customers. We are dedicated to continuous improvement and strive to anticipate, meet and exceed our customers' expectations. Our objective is to deliver defect free, reliable products on time, every time.

Strong Growth From the Start

Since it was initially founded in 2002 Insensys has grown from a group of 8 engineers based in Fareham (UK) to a well established global business. Today Insensys has office locations in Southampton (UK), Aberdeen (UK) and Houston (USA). This strong growth has been supported by the rapid acceptance of our technology across all of our market sectors.

The companies growth has only been possible due to our highly experienced design, development and manufacturing team which has enabled us to rapidly develop engineering solutions to meet our customer’s needs.

Alongside the wealth of experience in Fibre Optic Sensing we also have considerable experience in sensor deployment techniques, composite design and manufacture, structural design and Finite Element Analysis and software engineers.
This enables our design team to understand the exacting needs of our customer’s applications and enables us to design solutions which match their requirements.


_{Head Office and Manufacturing Facilities (Southampton, UK)}

Operational Market Sectors

Although our early deployments were based across a wide range of diverse markets sectors including Americas Cup Yachts, Formula 1 cars, bridges and tunnels and other highly demanding projects Insensys is now focussed on three discrete market sectors.

Today our primary markets are Wind Energy and Aerospace. Insensys quickly recognised that these markets all require load measurement system that offer high performance coupled with high reliability. Although the core measurement requirements are the same the top level system packaging and integration requirements are very different. To enable Insensys to meet these different needs we quickly established discrete engineering and sales teams enabling each one to specialise and focus on each of these 3 key market sectors.

Further specialisation has also taken place in each of these market sectors with different products being developed to suit specific applications. For example In the Wind Energy market Insensys has developed different packaging and deployment solutions enabling us to deliver practical deployment methods to Turbine Manufacturers, System Integrators OEM, Systems integrators and Owners

Advanced Solutions for Wind Energy Applications

Over the last 2 or 3 years the size of a typical Wind Turbine has doubled in size from 1 – 1.5 MW to 2 – 4 MW. This trend is looking to continue with multiple manufacturers now offering turbines that are greater than 5MW with even bigger machines on the drawing board. Much of this increase in generating capacity has been achieved by simply up-scaling existing technology platforms enabling a bigger rotor to be placed on a larger hub which in turn is connected to a larger drive-train.

The rotor diameters of this latest generation of turbines are now in the order of 90 – 130 m, with huge swept areas. This exposed the rotor and turbine drive train to effects that were previously not such an issue on smaller machines. These effects include a less uniform wind field over swept area, greater risk of inverse wind fields, asymmetric wind flow and increasing turbulence. All of these effects lead to more uneven loads on the turbines blades, drive train and turbine structure increasing the potential for damage over the turbines operational lifetime!

This large up-scaling in rotor diameter has also resulted in the key components of the turbien being significantly increased in size to enable them to cope with the larger loads experienced during operation. This has lead to turbines becoming very large and heavy resulting in transportation and installation challenges. To counteract this trend in increasing size and weight many of the next generation turbines are being specifically designed with new ‘smart’ technologies incorporated that enable are the same power to be harnessed using a smaller, lighter machine, whilst maintaining the high levels of operational performance and reliability. One such ‘smart’ technology is Active Pitch Control or Multi Variable Turbine Control.

In recent years Active or Multi-Variable pitch control algorithms have been developed which utilise real-time load information from the turbine during operation to deliver significant improvements in turbine performance. These performance improvements include significant reduction in structural fatigue loads, improved rotor balancing and reduced size and cost or key structural components.

Additionally as turbine locations are becoming more and more remote and blade sizes are increasing the task of inspecting the blades is becoming increasingly difficult. Structural Health Monitoring of blades and rotors is becoming more and more desirable and will lead to reduced operating and maintenance costs, reduced downtime and improved maintenance scheduling. Advanced monitoring techniques include accumulative load counting, residual lifetime estimation, critical event monitoring.

For these Advanced Control and Structural Health Monitoring systems to become successful a reliable and cost effective load measurement system must be deployed within the turbine which is capable of delivering highly accurate data for the lifetime of the turbine. The Insensys fibre optic load measurement technology has been developed specifically for these applications and has the technical and economic capability to meet these requirements.

Demanding Requirements

The technical and operational demands of the Wind Turbine hub and blade environment are considerable and are not to be underestimated. Any components installed in this area must be able to withstand high levels of shock and vibration, a large range of temperatures and must be capable of reliable operation in an area that is exposed to lightning strikes and Electro-Magnetic Interference.

Insensys has focussed on meeting these requirements and has specifically engineered products to meet and exceed these demands. Our products are all based on a mature, solid-state, Time Division Multiplexed fibre optic sensing platform that is unique to Insensys. It has been installed and tested in numerous field and laboratory trials by accredited test institutions and has also been exposed to a harsh program of compliance and environmental testing.

This has enabled Insensys to deliver high quality, reliable products to our customers that are capable of meeting the long term expectations and measurement requirements.