###### Abstract  
The exploitation of offshore windarms (WFs) goes hand in hand with large capital expenditures (CAPEX) and operational expenditures (OPEX), as these mechanical installations operate continuously for multiple decades in harsh, saline conditions. OPEX can account for up to 30% of the levelised cost of energy (LCoE) for a deployed offshore wind farm. To maintain the cost-competitiveness of deployed offshore WFs versus other renewable energy sources, their LCoE has to be kept in check, both by minimising the OPEX and optimising the offshore wind energy production. As corrosion, in particular uniform corrosion, is a major cause of failure of offshore wind turbine structures, there is an urgent need for corrosion management systems for deployed offshore wind turbine structures (WTs). Despite the fact that initial corrosion protection solutions are already integrated on some critical structural components such as WT towers, WT transition pieces or WT sub-structure (fixed or floating platforms), these components can still be harshly damaged by the corrosive environmental offshore conditions. The traditional preventive maintenance strategy, in which regular manual inspections by experts are necessary, is widely implemented nowadays in wind farm applications. Unfortunately, for such challenging operating environments, regular human inspections have a significant cost, which eventually increase the OPEX. To minimise the OPEX, remote corrosion monitoring solutions combined with supporting software (SW) tools are thus necessary. This paper focuses on the development of a software (SW) tool for the visualisation of corrosion measurement data. To this end, criteria for efficient structural corrosion analysis were identified, namely a scaleable, SCADA-compatible, secure, web accessible tool that can visualise 3D relationships. In order to be effective, the SW tool requires a tight integration with decision support tools. This paper provides three insights: Firstly, through a literature study and non-exhaustive market study, it is shown that a combined visualisation and decision SW tool is currently non-existing in the market. This gap motivates a need for the development of a custom SW tool. Secondly, the capabilities of the developed custom software tool, consisting of a backend layer and visualisation browser designed for this task are demonstrated and discussed in this paper. This indicates that a SCADA-compatible visualisation software tool is possible, and can be a major stepping stone towards a semi-automated decision support toolchain for offshore wind turbine corrosion monitoring. SCADA; visualisation; software; wind-turbine; windfarm; cross-platform; HMI; GUI; corrosion; monitoring +
Footnote †: journal: Applied Sciences
interactions, thereby increasing the importance of optimisation of operational costs and efficiency gains [1]. Europe is a leading player in this domain, notably for offshore wind turbine manufacturing, as (in 2015) European manufacturers produced around 41 to 50% of annually installed wind power installations worldwide. While this market share had increased up to 61% in 2017 [3], in the last five years, both China and USA have made an unprecedented comeback, partially driven by expiring government subsidies. In 2020 [4], the Chinese wind market dominated the global wind market, totalling 97 GW that year, with a share of 40% of the newly installed production capacity worldwide, both onshore and offshore. As the world's landmass is rather limited and already under tremendous pressure, offshore installations are becoming ever more popular. The mean cost per produced energy unit for offshore exploitation is rapidly decreasing, thereby closing the gap compared to conventional energy generation methods and onshore wind farms; therefore, many large investors in the domain of windfarm operations move towards larger wind turbines and offshore windfarms. Some sources predict that the global offshore wind farm (WF) market size will continue to grow at a rate of 12% per year [5].