Indeximate demonstrates new cable health monitoring techniques
03/12/2025
Indeximate, a leading provider of fibre sensing-based cable health monitoring to the offshore wind energy industry, has announced that it has demonstrated its cable health monitoring to RWE, the offshore wind farm operator. Following the company’s success in RWE’s 2023 Innovation Competition, over the winter of 2024-2025, Indeximate’s proprietary Scattersphere technology provided continuous health monitoring, tracking and analysis of two strings at the Arkona offshore wind farm in the Baltic Sea, covering 13 turbines.Indeximate’s technology leverages existing optical fibres that commonly exist in subsea power cables to collect and automatically interpret distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) data. The monitoring and analysis included key areas of the cable protection system (CPS) between touchdown and aperture, as well as inside the monopile from aperture to hang-off, where installation of sensors for monitoring has long been a legacy issue for the sector.
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| Hyperspectral data showing wave- and turbine-induced cable vibration and environmental noise for processing and analysis |
Over the six-month period, data were collected on the cables as they were subject to typical winter storm conditions, the effects of gravity and 7 m-high waves. Dynamic strain measurements from DAS were taken 2000 times per second at 10 m intervals along the cables. Indeximate compressed the raw data in real time using its proprietary Indeximation technology and uploaded it to its cloud portal, the Scattersphere, where automated analytics extracted several long-term risk profiles for the cable, including abrasion, strain, fatigue integrity and vibration.
Automated analysis of the data identified signatures related to cable movement, abrasion and vibration, as well as fatigue and damage. Analysed alongside co-registered wave and wind data, the long-term data record allows Indeximate to observe how the cables behaved in certain conditions, such as directional weather and specific wave heights, and identify where issues may emerge. These insights have the potential to identify points of failure in advance, providing time for operations and maintenance (O&M) teams to develop approaches to mitigate issues and avoid disruption and downtime, which can cost operators millions.
Commenting on the ongoing monitoring work, Dr Chris Minto, Director of Indeximate, said: “Our proprietary data compression and analysis technologies are unlocking vital insight into cable health that was previously unavailable to operators and allows us to establish health and risk profiles for all subsea power cables, helping operators to 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 offshore wind farm in the hard-to-inspect regions inside the monopile and through the CPS, showing how weather variations affect cable health.”
Anika Borm-Schmelcher, Head of Innovation and Industrialisation at RWE Offshore Wind, commented: “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 its data processing and monitoring technologies have further developed and it has now demonstrated its 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 uses industry-leading proprietary data compression technology to enable the analysis of petabytes of long-term DAS data collected using optical fibres that commonly exist as part of subsea power cables in Indeximate’s cable health monitoring Scattersphere technology.
Historical pattern and trend analysis allows the creation of years-long risk profiles, which enable cable operators to continuously assess risks to assets, understand remaining life and benefit from early warning and detection of cable flaws. New fibre sensing and data compression approaches are enabling the offshore wind industry to re-evaluate cable monitoring and the extent of insights that can be gathered on cable health, environment and the water column.
Indeximate Ltd, a UK-based climate technology company, was founded in 2022 with the aim of tackling the critical offshore wind industry problem of premature cable failure. The company transforms complex fibre-optic sensor data into clear cable health intelligence for the offshore wind industry. Built on decades of sensing expertise, its cloud-based analytics predict and prevent cable failures before they impact operations.
