This thesis investigates the potential of Augmented Reality (AR) headsets to enhance field technicians’ performance (in terms of efficiency and effectivity) in Operations and Maintenance (O&M) processes in Offshore Wind Farms (OWF), with Vattenfall’s operations serving as the case study. The key deliverable of this report has been the Business Case (Chapter 9), which provides a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the AR enhanced business process innovation. A critical gap for such empirical case studies was identified in the field of industrial AR applications, especially in offshore wind contexts, as noted in Chapter 1. The research is further motivated by the generation of a generalisable multi-framework approach for business process innovation. This approach evaluates the business case of novel technologies such as AR in capital-intensive industries, fitting in Vattenfall’s (generalisable) Stage-Gate innovation model (Chapter 2). Furthermore, societal impact is granted through accelerating the energy transition, by providing the first step in a business process innovation that should lower the O&M costs (which is about 30% of the Levelised Cost of Energy (LCOE, full lifecycle cost) (Bosch et al., 2019)) of renewable energy, improving its competitiveness against fossil fuels (Chapter 2).

High-powered LED arrays have emerged as a viable alternative to halogen lamp-based arrays for heating silicon wafers to 1000C due to their monochromatic radiosity which can be chosen in an efficient bandwidth for high absorption into silicon, removing the requirement for the pre-soak anneal in traditional systems. However, a gap in literature is found as there are only low temperature applications for LED arrays found (max. 400C), on which the research is focussed around improving the control system design. The high-temperature RTP application for LEDs has not yet been studied in literature or implemented in industry. Advancements over the past decades have sharply increased the radiometric flux and efficacy of LEDs, enabling more and more high-powered applications. However, due to the exceptionally small size and high heat fluxes of high-powered LED chips, junction cooling has traditionally been a major bottleneck for implementing LEDs in demanding applications. For the power levels required in 1000C RTP, the feasibility of LEDs in terms of power output, wafer temperature uniformity and cooling of LED-based heater arrays remains unproven. Through a systems-based approach, a multi-domain fundamental analysis and simulation in the fields of linear algebra, heat transfer, optics, electrical engineering, semiconductor physics, CAD and FEM has been performed. Resultingly, feasibility has been demonstrated for 1000C LED RTP.