Non-Linear Control for Floating Wind Turbines: Using Reset Control to overcome non-minimum phase zeros

As the world is shifting away from fossil fuel-based electricity production, mainly due to concerns for man-made climate change, a sharp rise in demand for wind powered electricity production is seen. In order to meet future demand, the vast amount of off-shore wind resources can be unlocked. A key technology for this task are floating wind...

An iterative algorithm for frequency-domain optimization of fixed-structure controllers: A multi-model approach

Data-driven control approaches have been proved highly effective in applications where the dynamics of the system are unknown. The reason is that the use of data in control overcomes the challenge of parametric modeling which requires effort and often leads to an insufficient description of the system’s behavior. By contrast, the behavior of the...

Power Reference Tracking in Wind Farms Through Distributive Model Predictive Control

With the increasing use of wind energy as a power source, new challenges arise. One of these challenges is maintaining a stable power grid. On the power grid, the amount of energy generated and consumed should be in balance. As wind power has an unpredictable and fluctuating nature, it is presumable that its increasing use makes it problematic...

Development and Analysis of Advance Velocity Observers for Marine Propulsion Systems

Marine propulsion systems with diesel engines face continuous variations in propeller shaft speed and torque during operation, due to waves and changing rudder and water inflow angles. Traditional propulsion control systems do not take these variations into account, and attempt to maintain a constant shaft speed. These changing torques, in...

Feedforward control for wave disturbance rejection on floating offshore wind turbines

Classical feedback control for floating offshore wind turbines has limited capabilities to reduce wave disturbances. Feedforward control uses disturbance measurement, to construct an additional control law such that the disturbance is attenuated. The main objective of this work is to prove the concept of wave-FF control to attenuate wave...

System design and control of a novel ocean wave energy converter array

There is a great amount of wave power in earth's oceans. The amount of power harvested for electricity is however very small in comparison to solar and wind. One of the reasons for this is the lack of consensus on the best design of wave energy converters. This thesis develops a novel system design for a wave energy converter array that has...

Adaptive feedforward for reset control systems: Application in precision motion control

Distributed State Estimation for Medium-Fidelity Wind Farm Models in pursuit of Model-Based Closed-Loop Control

In research, the overall power production in a wind farm is typically increased by employing model-based wind farm control. A controller, in an open-loop setting, operates based on the velocity of the wind flow, predicted by a wind farm model. For a controller to achieve the desired level of power production, a wind farm model has to be accurate...

Development of a low-cost computer vision sensor for precision positioning systems: Exploring the limits of computer vision sensors in precision systems

Computer vision has been on the rise over the last decades. The applications of computer vision are mostly found within the domain of robotics and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle's. The use of computer visions in precision industry is new and offers both opportunities and challenges. In high performance precision systems the demands on sensors is set...

Enhancement of Conventional IPC Decoupling by Inclusion of an Azimuth Offset

Wind turbine technology has become one of the most attractive solutions to generate electricity as well as to cope with the global carbon emissions. Having a prospective future in terms of growing worldwide demands, it becomes more important to reduce the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCoE) of the wind turbine which is generally done by...

System Identification of the 2B6 Wind Turbine: A regularised PBSIDopt approach

Making offshore wind energy more cost competitive in comparison to fossil-fuel based production, is vital to maintain the direction the European Union has taken in renewable energy. Increasing the lifetime of a turbine can play a big role in driving down the overall costs of energy. The more energy the turbine is able to produce in its lifetime,...