Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 January 2027.
Offshore wind turbines are exposed to harsh marine conditions that accelerate degradation and make inspection costly, hazardous, and weather-dependent. Early fault detection is needed to reduce downtime and prevent structural failure. This review investigates offshore wind turbine failure mechanisms, inspection technologies, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and robotic systems, computer-vision-based defect detection, infrared thermography, and drone-assisted maintenance. A structured literature review methodology was used to synthesise studies across offshore engineering, robotics, sensing, and machine learning. The findings show that autonomous offshore fault detection remains limited by a lack of real-world experimentation and data. UAV inspection systems offer strong remote inspection capability but often lack real-time perception and adaptive autonomy, while deep learning models remain highly dependent on controlled datasets and are vulnerable to offshore environmental noise. The literature is disconnected, with few studies integrating autonomous navigation, multimodal sensing, and onboard intelligence into a unified offshore inspection framework. These findings demonstrate the need for robust drone-based systems capable of reliable visual and thermal fault detection in real offshore environments.
Traditional onshore hydrogen production systems are constrained by limited land availability and freshwater resources, which restrict their potential for large-scale deployment. Offshore renewable energy-based hydrogen production systems provide an effective approach for accommodating abundant marine renewable energy resources and establishing integrated green hydrogen supply chains, representing a promising pathway toward future zero-carbon energy systems. However, system-level integration technologies remain in the stages of theoretical development and engineering demonstration, with several critical technical challenges that limit their commercial deployment and large-scale application. This paper presents a narrative review of the typical configurations and key technologies of offshore renewable energy-based hydrogen production systems. Based on recent global research advances and representative marine engineering demonstrations, major technical challenges, including stochastic fluctuations of renewable power generation, seawater corrosion, and multi-physics-field monitoring, are comprehensively analyzed. Corresponding mitigation strategies, such as multi-energy complementary integration and corrosion-resistant material optimization, are summarized. Furthermore, from a system-level perspective, the coupling mechanisms among multiple subsystems are investigated, and a whole-chain coordinated optimization framework is proposed. This review provides theoretical foundations and engineering references for the large-scale deployment and integrated development of offshore green hydrogen production systems.
