Energy production hubs are emerging as a solution to stabilize power grids that are increasingly being challenged by renewable energy sources. The deployment of grid-forming inverters (GFMIs) inherently involves grid regulation tasks such as voltage and frequency control. Such control is distinctly advantageous over the passive grid-following inverter. GFMIs can actively stabilize the grid, but their introduction necessitates a coupling reactance to facilitate voltage and current control. Autonomous voltage and frequency control requires real-time coordination. However, applying MPC is complex due to the multiscale nature of the control problem. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a combined controller-hub design where a three-layer hierarchical MPC scheme controls an energy production hub comprised of an integrated energy storage system, a wind turbine, and a GFMI. By decomposing the problem into three distinct layers, the upper two layers can operate in non-real time and require only the bottom layer to work in real time. By designing the middle layer with a novel approach, we investigate how the coupling reactance dynamics affect the power setpoint determination of the energy production hub. The goal is to facilitate control over the grid's active and reactive power flows, voltage, and frequency. As the angle-based droop control law governs the coupling reactance dynamics, we study its incorporation into the MPC objective function and its effect on frequency stability. A simulation study shows how the droop control element alters the power setpoints in the middle layer to compensate for such frequency fluctuations. The results suggest that the hub and controller can reliably provide power from an uncontrolled, sustainable source while providing local stability to the energy grid.

The use of overconstrained mechanisms is often avoided in precision mechanics. Misalignments in the mechanism can cause deteriorated system behaviour, such as buckling. Overconstrained designs do have several advantages, such as higher load bearing capacity and higher natural frequencies. However, these advantages are only present if the mechanism is aligned within certain tolerances. In this paper a method is introduced to identify the limits of these alignment tolerances. The method allows the calculation of the forces in the mechanism due to misalignment. The internal forces are compared to the buckling loads of the mechanism yielding the critical misalignments; the method is corroborated using a multibody simulations. Subsequently, both analyses are compared to an experimental setup; this setup measures the first three modal frequencies and identifies the buckling modes. The proposed method and multibody simulation match with each other and the experiment. However, the critical misalignments are about 20% larger in the experiment; this is mainly attributed to hardware imperfections. Due to misalignment and flatness limitations of the flexures, the undeflected stiffness in the experiment is lower than modelled. The deterioration of the support stiffness is smaller in the experiment. In the most serious case, it retains 80% of the modal frequency in the support directions. The proposed method can be used as a guideline to estimate the manufacturing and assembly tolerances of an overconstrained flexure-based mechanism.

Human standing balance is a complex of systems, like the muscles, nervous system and sensory systems, interacting with each other in a closed loop to maintain upright stance. With age, disease and medication use these systems deteriorate, which could result in impaired balance. In this paper, it is demonstrated that multi-input-multi-output closed loop system identification techniques (MIMO-CLSIT) can be used to assess the underlying systems involved in standing balance and guide possible therapeutic options. In this study, mechanical and sensory perturbations were combined and applied simultaneously using a Balance test Room. The results demonstrate the value of MIMO-CLSIT to assess the underlying systems involved in standing balance and therefore to improve diagnosis of impaired standing balance.