Augmented Reality Tooling for Field Technicians in Operations & Maintenance of Offshore Wind Farms
Technical Feasibility, Process Analysis, and Business Case
V.S. van Merrienboer (TU Delft - Mechanical Engineering)
Pieter Gelder – Mentor (TU Delft - Safety and Security Science)
N. Mouter – Mentor (TU Delft - Transport and Logistics)
D. Zappalá – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Wind Energy)
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Abstract
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).