BeSound – Acoustic Emission Monitoring System for Predictive Maintenance in Offshore And Maritime Industry

Production downtime is a costly problem for the maritime - and offshore industry. Critical lifting equipment that fails causes expensive downtime and maintenance. This makes it extremely valuable to perform condition monitoring of the machinery. Especially during lifting operations with large cranes driven by hydraulic cylinders and steel wires. BeSound has been a research project at NORCE, carried out through the «Center for Research-based Innovation (SFI) - Offshore Mechatronics» for the past seven years. The project has shown that it is possible to predict failure and wear at the component level. Access to this type of information can be of great value to the maritime- and offshore industry in the form of significant cost savings and prolonged machine life. Our vision is to commercialize BeSound – a condition and monitoring system that uses acoustic sensors to assess the equipment's condition and predict what might fail before a failure occurs. This to facilitate planned maintenance when it costs the least. The main goal of the commercialization project is to test the system in a relevant industrial environment to verify the research operationally. In collaboration with industrial partners, we believe that the technology can become competitive and market leading. Due to the systems versatile architecture, our market research has shown that there are several possible areas of application for BeSound, for instance, condition monitoring of batteries, hydro power turbines and production systems for the wind power industry.