I was extremely happy to being awarded one of the Early Career Researchers grants by the Supergen ORE Hub. The grant allowed me to undertake a 2-weeks industrial placement at INEA in Ljubljana, Slovenia. INEA is the leading Slovenian company in the field of manufacturing informatics, system integration, automation and automated process control. The main objective of this activity was to learn about industry standards and best practices in the condition monitoring and sensing of industrial machines, in order to understand how this knowledge can be transferred to the ORE sector.
During my secondment, I had the opportunity to get familiar with INEA’s products for energy management and systems automation. These include inEIS, a software for the energy monitoring of factories, and KIBERnet, for the smart management and peak demand reduction of industrial plants. Besides, I learnt about the working principles of automation in industry, including Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, Programming Logic Controllers (PLCs) and Human-Machine Interface (HMI).
At the same time, I could conduct a thorough review of the state of the art in condition monitoring and condition-based maintenance, with particular reference to offshore renewable devices. I took advantage of my secondment to critically discuss these findings with INEA’s personnel, in order to assess potential benefits and limitations of their application in ORE devices with experts on the subject.
Thanks to this secondment I will be able to improve the computational O&M planning tools for offshore renewable currently available at the University of Exeter. Besides, this placement paved the way for a future journal paper on the condition-based maintenance of ORE devices.
I wish to thank the Supergen ORE Hub team for the professional support provided throughout my application experience, as well as the wider consortium for giving the opportunity to grow as a researcher in the offshore renewables sector.
This blog was written by Dr Giovanni Rinaldi, Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. Giovanni was successful in securing funding through the Supergen ORE Hub Early Career Researcher Research Funding for an industrial secondment to INEA.
You can read more about Giovanni's project and access resources on the project webpage.
- If you're interested in joining our Early Career Researcher community, please visit the website for more information.
