Revolutionizing Water-Energy Infrastructure Resilience through Distributed Sensing and Digital Twins

This white paper addresses the intersection of Water for Energy and Energy for Water, proposing foundational technology to enhance the resilience and operational longevity of critical national assets, including hydropower facilities and marine energy systems.

The core challenge is the dual threat facing this infrastructure: systemic degradation from advanced age, evidenced by poor ASCE infrastructure grades, and escalating stress from climate change. This is compounded by a critical "data blindness," as current integrity management relies on sparse, infrequent monitoring that cannot detect hidden failure modes or provide the high-fidelity data needed to power predictive digital twins. In the marine energy sector, this uncertainty forces costly over-design, hindering economic viability.

A significant near-term opportunity exists to create "sentient infrastructure" by integrating embedded distributed sensing technologies, such as Distributed Fiber Optic Sensing (DFOS). This would create a structural "nervous system" providing a continuous, high-resolution data stream to calibrate and validate high-fidelity digital twins. This transforms the digital twin from a static model into a dynamic, living replica capable of enabling predictive maintenance, optimizing operations, and de-risking new designs, particularly for marine energy systems.

Success measures are both quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative metrics include a greater than tenfold increase in measurement density, a >50% reduction in predictive model uncertainty, a 20-30% extension in asset service life, and a 15-25% reduction in design conservatism for marine energy systems. Qualitative measures focus on establishing new industry standards, increasing stakeholder confidence and technology adoption, and strengthening public safety through infrastructure with inherent, real-time, early-warning capabilities.