Modular Offshore Instrumentation System Installation Underway

Eric Nelson and his team from the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) arrived late Saturday night, and by Sunday morning they were hard at work installing the Modular Offshore Instrumentation System (MOIS) on the Azura. Designed for both centralized and distributed I/O, processing, and control, MOIS can integrate measurements from both the Azura and its mooring system. This specialized instrumentation system has been field-proven in numerous marine applications, including recent testing of an offshore wind turbine in Norway. A special thanks to Dr. Rick Driscoll and all of the staff at NREL for organizing this critical part of the Azura ocean testing.

A team of instrumentation experts and certified LabView programmers leveraged decades of wind and marine system field testing, along with international standards, to create MOIS. The system is built on National Instruments PXI and cRIO hardware and uses the LabVIEW software to implement object-oriented software architecture with individual modules for separate functions and measurements. This design yields a modular and scalable infrastructure that enables rapid customization in a pick-and-place methodology to meet changing measurement needs.