Since starting Indeximate in 2022 we have brought innovation to the critical industrial problem of premature failure in Subsea Cables, pioneered “Preventing Subsea Cable Failure” as our mantra and offered a paradigm shift away from reactive to preventative maintenance. Our oldest subscribing customers now have 2.5 years of DAS data in our archives – Indeximated (compressed) full bandwidth DAS data, successfully stored in the cloud for a complete temporal record.
The next question and the next stage of our evolution is – so can we put this data to good use?
Anyone who knows us will recognise that we advocate in general for DAS as a technology platform as the data streams are so rich and versatile, yet industry is presented with single solution offerings – i.e. hardware + software to deliver one ends. A key motivation for starting Indeximate was to resolve this wasted opportunity and find a way to deliver multiple applications but from a single raw set of data – meaning that CAPEX is applied most effectively.
We are now at the beginning of this new era with the launch of three new products meaning that for a subsea cable operator there is a new route to ensuring that their monitoring CAPEX can be exploited multiple times:
All now join our core Scattersphere for Cable Monitoring to deliver four applications that can all be run from a single subsea cable monitoring hardware unit – the DAS.
What can we do with these? Join is in exploring a new paradigm of Continuous Offshore Intelligence where we deliver multiple products from dense datasets without offshore work limited to a single unit deployed at substation.
Scattersphere for turbine health
Our cables come up from the seabed, through an aperture or bellmouth and up to hang-off. At Hang off we are intimately connected to the turbine structure and can feel all the swaying of the platform, the motion of the nacelle and even the turning of the blades (in fact we can actually feel this vibrating through the seabed out to around 300m – but here at hangoff the signal is strongest and clearest).
The traditional approach to monitoring monopile integrity/stiffness is to deploy an accelerometer on a 10% sample which is used to calibrate a model that takes a SCADA feed and uses this data to decide on the state of the monopile – i.e. has the natural frequency decayed to a point that the foundations are starting to weaken?
Well, you already have an accelerometer at hangoff – it’s just sitting there unused. The fibre in the power cable connected to the turbine. We enabled this, collect all the data in our Indeximated Scattersphere and as well as monitoring for the health of the cable we fork the data into our second Scattersphere – Turbine Health. Here we extract the natural frequency vibration of every monopile, store it and track it over time. We implement a traffic light system over a long moving average to track the behaviour. Years of natural frequency content tracked over time, ranked across every turbine with simple alerting and exploration mechanisms. Don’t be in the dark on turbine health. Scattersphere for turbine health is available like Scattersphere for cables priced per turbine. You don’t need to subscribe to any of our other products – you can just take this for one simple price/turbine/year.
Scattersphere for wave state mapping
We’ve talked in the past about our sensitivity to hydrostatic pressure. We use this in our vessel detection for example to detect the displacement of vessels passing overhead. The same natural responsivity of the cable to pressure (which is phenomenally sensitive) also responds to the changing pressure from the moving head of water above the cable. Imagine now that our cables are pressure sensors, responding to waves moving overhead – a sensor every few metres along the cable. Again, we capture this information and process it into the usual critical wave height measurements / direction and period. This is then available either as an interpolated map across the whole windfarm (or along the length of an export cable) or at specific virtual wavebuoy locations between turbines.
We can now offer real time wave heights at every turbine. As an aid to planning this augments forecasting by allowing individual locations to be mapped giving a real baseline of activity in circumstances where other device outputs can not be relied on. It supports clearer decision making to extend or curtail operational envelopes. As with our other products, no data is ever deleted wave height data is preserved alongside our raw data providing an invaluable resource for meta studies / academic analysis.
Scattersphere for wave state is available like Scattersphere for cables priced per area of monitoring. You don’t need to subscribe to any of our other products – you can just take this for one simple price/km2/year.
Scattersphere for Vessel Detection
Finally, there is Scattersphere for vessel detection – originally created as part of an MOD/DSTL funded DASA programme in 2025, this is now available to detect and plot the movement of vessels in the vicinity of the cable as well as to detect and measure vessel crossings. Critically by detecting the vessels directly we are not reliant on AIS, this approach works completely independently of AIS – un-jammable and operational independent of whether vessel operators decide to turn off their AIS.
For Vessel Detection, we’ve used our long experience in DAS to maximise that data that can be scalped from a sensing feed. We detect in three ways – first we seek propeller noise then engine noise and feed this into a hyperspectral acoustic mesh and then deploy advanced machine learning to detect and classify vessels by their emissions. This has many advantages – we can detect vessels out to extended distances (+/- 1km from any cable) and it gives us a much greater opportunity to be resilient to weather impingement. In comparison to a traditional acoustic energy detector, the machine learning neural network based on space-time visual detection (like our eyes do) is incredibly resilient to increasing wave state / deteriorating weather.
We augment this with a further detector – the displacement pressure caused by the vessels hull / speed combination. Yes, we feel the presence of the vessel on the seabed. Like our sensitive wave measurements, the vessels make an impact on the cable on the seabed. We pull this together into our third approach which is used to detect vessel crossings.
In addition to these automated detections a whole host of additional meta data can be extracted or delivered to critical national infrastructure users in parallel. Vessel size / speed / heading / classification / Suggested ID / acoustic signature etc. All possible because underneath all of this surface data is running the most powerful subsea listening network that has ever existed. Dwarfing cold war SOSUS efforts, we are turning every cable we monitor into a SOSUS array and combining them in the cloud to a single vast entity.
Scattersphere for vessel detection is available like Scattersphere for cables priced per area of monitoring (for a windfarm) or linear area (export cables). You don’t need to subscribe to any of our other products – you can just take this for one simple price/km2/year.
Multiple Users / Multiple Domains
The applications delivered may be delivered to a single entity such as a windfarm operator – but as is clear, some of this utility spreads far beyond a single user. A new world is ahead where vessel operators can benefit from enhanced wave height information, where turbine manufacturers can receive improved through life ageing content and defence customers can benefit from the efforts of assets owners to manage their cables.
Scattersphere will not be tied to a single asset, a single customer or a single DAS. This is the power of Indeximation – by moving our processing to the cloud we enable multiple applications to be delivered in parallel to a the critical user but at the same time to deliver parallel applications or spin outs to external users.
We’ve espoused this approach for many years (see this earlier blog) but we are finally in the position to deliver multiple sets of benefits from a single stream of data.
What is the nature of those relationships and how do we protect core customer interests?
We will never compromise customer confidentiality and we’ve built our systems around this. We won’t be issuing notices of cable degradation to potential repairers or to cable manufacturers for example. We carefully separated Indeximated Data from Risk products / Evolved Products. Risk products or evolved products are reserved for the key customer – typically the one who owns the DAS and the asset. These will never be released. But the additional uses of the Indeximated data – this is where we can bring additional benefit to core customers – either by supporting their liaison with external stakeholders, supporting license constraints or as a straightforward commercial trade. Scattersphere sits at the centre of a new era of Sensing as a Service – lowering the cost of hardware ownership by delivering multiple products in parallel to multiple communities.
Join us in opening up this new feature by getting a quote for your windfarm today.
Come and speak to an expert to learn how you can rapidly start to use your cables to deliver multiple streams of benefit.
