Internet of Underwater Things to monitor offshore wind turbines fields
Résumé
Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) has gained large popularity 1. The real time supervision requirement of both ecosystems and offshore infrastructures explains this world wide interest. Large offshore wind projects are now launched off the French coasts and among them, the first farm will be installed by 2023 offshore St Nazaire harbour, providing an opportunity to establish an IoUT in an industrial environment. The paper is presenting some preliminary results of the Blue IoT - Eolia project which has the objectives to design and to test an underwater acoustic network dedicated to the supervision of subsea infrastructures and environmental parameters needed to ensure safety and reliability of wind turbines. Typical sensors (force and pressure sensors, inclinometers, thermometers, etc.) and different acoustic modems are tested to illustrate the capacities of such underwater networks to accommodate various parameters. Strategies to avoid collisions in the different acoustic channels are developed using a Medium Access Control (MAC) layer, some results and analyses being presented in the paper 2,3. Finally a first experimentation in a natural environment conducted during summer 2021 (in the river Erdre at Nantes, France) will be detailed, illustrated and compared with the literature 4,5. A demonstration underwater network is expected to be installed during 2022 in real conditions on SEM-REV, the marine renewable multi-technology field test site of Centrale Nantes, located offshore Le Croisic (France)