The purpose of this action is to assist the €2.8bn European and global liquid storage and distribution industry in reducing the costs involved in ensuring that leaks do not occur from 500,000 above ground storage tanks (ASTs), thus avoiding avoid damage to the environment and the loss of revenue from the unscheduled outages of leaking tanks, currently estimated at €132m. At its core is the exploitation of Plant Integrity’s proven non-invasive storage tank floor monitoring technology capable of detecting defects as small as 25mm. Plant Integrity’s SafeAST system provides continuous structural condition monitoring of ASTs, detecting any corrosion hotspots in the internal tank floor without the need to empty the tank and manually inspect the welds. Plant Integrity provides this continuous monitoring by integrating its long range ultrasonic testing (LRUT) with sophisticated sensors and systems in order to detect defects in the annular ring and bottom plates. The principal aim of this action is to provide final pre-launch confirmation of performance data to demonstrate the capability of SafeAST in detecting time-dependent degradation of the AST tank floor. The secondary aim is to provide a package of comprehensive launch material (including validated Technical Reports, supportive marketing material, final hardware specification and software sign-off) to aid a successful launch. The five-strong SafeAST consortium comprises the Tüpras oil and gas company which operates tank farms, research and academic organisations, plus client-facing industrial product development consultancies. Its Vision is to create a highly profitable, sustainable company (cash positive in 2 years, turnover €24m in four years) capable of delivering both hardware and services worth €80k pa to the AST condition monitoring sector (t/o €800m in Europe alone) and for its core technology to be recognised as the global primary on-line monitoring method in the world’s 7600 live plants.

The European ship fleet counts 23,000 vessels, accounting for the 40% of the global gross tonnage. Marine industry is a major prosperity engine of the EU contributing a total of €147bn to the GDP and supporting more than 1.7m jobs. However, the vessels’ structural integrity verification is a major issue for the shipping industry. Regulations dictate that Non Destructive Testing (NDT) inspections should be performed every 5 years for the first decade of a vessel’s life and every 2.5 years thereafter. Ship hull weld inspection is a challenging process as safety-critical welds length exceeds 120km in large vessels and involves human inspectors on site using scaffolding or cherry-pickers. These procedures require long periods of dry-docking incurring loss of revenue and costs amounting to more than €150k per inspection. Moreover conventional ultrasonic techniques cannot be applied on metal plates of thickness <10mm, which are commonly used nowadays to reduce ship weight. This necessitates the use of dangerous radiographic techniques posing health and safety issues. These challenges give rise to a unique business opportunity which Spectrum Labs and Tecnitest (leading NDT equipment and service providers) along with Innora (dynamic high-tech company specializing in robotics) and TWI (global leader in NDT technology) aspire to seize with the help of Lloyds’ Register, the most reputable shipping service provider with 230 years of experience. We aim to redefine ship NDT inspection by commercializing ShipTest, a laser-guided robotic crawler able to automatically track the weld and inspect the hull while the ship is at sea. Through a combination of bleeding-edge ultrasonic and electromagnetic techniques ShipTest can accurately inspect metal plates of <10mm thickness eliminating the need for radiography. By commercialising ShipTest we will grow our businesses by €47.7m, cumulatively over 5 years, generating €19.04m in profits and creating 398 direct jobs and 1185 indirect jobs

To achieve a thorough investigation for defect presence on a wind turbine blade, close inspection is required. This implies either trained staff tied with ropes on the blade or dismantling and transferring the blade in a workshop environment. While blade dismantling is scarcely used because it requires very long downtime, human inspection also involve a relatively high delay. A solution to this problem is to utilize specially designed platforms that can reach the blade and implement faster inspections on site. However, current systems are not very agile or cannot reach close enough to the blade in order to use a high quality nondestructive technique. Hence, they are mostly used to carry out mere visual inspections. To deal with the aforementioned challenge, our team will commercialize WInspector. WInspector consists of an agile robotic platform able to climb up the wind turbine tower and deploy an advanced Digital Shearography kit that carries out the inspection of a blade at a depth of up to 50mm. Users of WInspector benefit through early detecting emerging defects unseen in a visual inspection performed by competing solutions, with a significantly lower downtime for the WTB, and free of dangerous human labor. We have tested and validated the capabilities of WInspector in relevant environment and based on feedback received by wind farm operators, including project participant Gamesa and Iberdola (who has supported us in writing for this application), we are now ready to take the next steps and complete product development allowing us to bring WInspector into the market. Our vision is to grow our businesses by €19.88 million in gross sales by 2023 and keep growing at 58.8% annually from 2023 onwards. Through our business growth, we will create 181 new jobs. It is our strong belief that the Fast Track to Innovation Pilot is the ideal financial instrument for us to accelerate the procedures required for commercialization.

The EU Agency for Safety & Health is currently amending wind turbine standards (such as EN 50308) to ensure safer O&M tasks and increase the Probability Of Detection (POD) for wind turbine defects. ISO have also identified such issues, and in fact initiated the development of QA standards specifically tailored for the Condition Monitoring (CM) of wind turbines. Current CM systems are intrusive, and hence revoke the initial OEM warranty of drive-train components. The combination of industrial and legislative factors is the key driver behind the production of CMDrive: a bespoke and non-intrusive acoustic-analysis CM system, having a POD for drive-train defects of 90-98% within the range of operating powers. The requested grant of €2.5m will be required to validate and enhance the system, and initiate the commercialisation process. Growth in the wind services sector, as related to O&M and CM, is also compelling, as studies by Deloitte have shown that the corresponding market is estimated to increase from €5.2b to €10.8b by 2020, with a CAGR of 10%. The first generation of CMDrive shall be produced for wind turbines of 2.5MW or less; a next generation product, to handle larger turbines, has already been envisioned. The commercialisation strategy involves the segmentation of the wind turbine market into 3 initial customer tiers, is targeting WFOs and Independent Service Providers of CM within such tiers, and will position the product through a number of Unique Selling Points, which will be elaborated further in this proposal. The locations of the 5 partners, in addition to the global outreach of TWI and INESCO, are critical factors for launching the product by 2019. It is expected that CMDrive’s associated revenue streams (sales, services, licensing) will yield an estimated ROI of 1100%, and corresponding cumulative profits of €26m, over the 5 year forecast (2019–2023). INESCO will take lead of the sales, with the other partners benefiting by means of profit shares.