Model-Based Plant Design and Hierarchical Control of a Prototype Lighter-Than-Air Wind Energy System, With Experimental Flight Test Results

Vermillion, Chris; Grunnagle, Trey; Lim, Ronny Salim; Kolmanovsky, Ilya

doi:10.1109/tcst.2013.2263505

Cited by 69 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…8 shows a heading offset that corresponds to the BAT operating under the initial set of design parameters. This behavior was in fact observed in full-scale flight under improper ballasting configurations, as described in [17] and [16]. It is therefore encouraging that the experimentallyinfused optimization employed in this work was able to identify and rectify this known problem.…”

Section: Case Study Resultssupporting

confidence: 64%

“…2 to the Altaeros BAT, we introduce the basic model and controller structure that is used for numerical optimization, along with key variables. A more detailed description of the dynamic model is presented in [17] and [15].…”

Section: Altaeros Buoyant Airborne Turbine (Bat) Plant and Contromentioning

confidence: 99%

“…4 shows the block diagram for the controller structure considered in this work. The controller, which is also detailed in [17], incorporates an upper level controller that determines trim settings for altitude and pitch angle, namely z sp and θ sp , along with a lower level controller that manipulates the tethers in order to track z sp , θ sp , and φ sp = 0 (i.e., a desired roll angle of zero). In order to achieve this tracking, the lower level controller consists of a three lead filters, given as follows:ū…”

Section: A Key Plant Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A case study in experimentally-infused plant and controller optimization for airborne wind energy systems

Deodhar

Vermillion

Tkacik

2015

2015 American Control Conference (ACC)

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This paper presents a combined plant and controller optimization process for airborne wind energy systems (AWEs) that fuses numerical optimization with labscale experimental results. The methodology introduced in this paper, referred to as experimentally-infused optimization, addresses several challenges faced by AWE system designers, including a strong coupling between the controller and plant design, significant modeling uncertainties (which require the use of experiments), and high costs associated with full-scale experimental prototypes. This paper presents an initial case study of the proposed experimentally-infused optimization, where experiments were conducted on a 1/100 th -scale model of Altaeros Buoyant Air Turbine (BAT), which was tethered and flown in the University of North Carolina at Charlotte 1m × 1m water channel. The lab-scale experimental platform reduced the cost of evaluating flight dynamics and control by more than two orders of magnitude, while resulting in substantially improved flight performance, quantified by a 15.2 percent improvement in an objective function value, as compared to a purely numerical optimization.

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Section: Case Study Resultssupporting

confidence: 64%

Section: Altaeros Buoyant Airborne Turbine (Bat) Plant and Contromentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Key Plant Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A case study in experimentally-infused plant and controller optimization for airborne wind energy systems

Deodhar

Vermillion

Tkacik

2015

2015 American Control Conference (ACC)

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“…This also reduces the overall loading on the tethers which is advantageous for scaling up to larger designs. A study was conducted in [15] to demonstrate this scaling effect. The total system mass for the system was related to the shroud surface area, the overall loading and the mass increase of the rotor proportional to its power output.…”

Section: Optimisationmentioning

confidence: 95%

A Critical Assessment of Airborne Wind Energy Systems

Samson¹,

Vermillion

Katebi³

2013

2nd IET Renewable Power Generation Conference (RPG 2013)

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This paper focuses on the different types design of Airborne Wind Energy Systems (AWES) and their control architecture. The main focus of this paper will be on a novel lighter than air system developed by Altaeros Energies. AWES combines cutting edge innovation with practical engineering design to produce a system capable of rivalling conventional wind energy generation. Closed-form control strategies provide greater transparency and make tuning and debugging in realtime much easier. Control architecture of this type will be presented for the Altaeros system. This paper contributes to existing literature by focusing on the Altaeros design, discussing the relative advantages and disadvantages that this system holds over other airborne systems and conventional wind generation.

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“…These include balloons [1], airborne wind turbines [2], and tethered airfoils (kites) [3]- [8]. The main advantage of reaching higher altitudes lies in the fact that the wind speed grows with the elevation from the ground, and that the power that can be extracted by a wind flow grows with the cube of its speed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predictive functional control of power kites for high altitude wind energy generation based on hybrid neural network

Wang

2015

2015 34th Chinese Control Conference (CCC)

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The power kite is a kind of high altitude wind energy (HAWE), which has received an increasing attention in the last decade. The unique feature of the kite-based system is its structural simplicity coupled with the complexity in its modeling and control. Since the system is open-loop unstable, it is difficult to model and it subjects to significant external disturbances during operation. To address these challenges, nonlinear predictive functional controller (PFC) is presented in this paper. Firstly, a predictive model is established for the power kite using hybrid neural network, and then the PFC principles are applied for its controller design. With the neural network structure, the PFC integrates on-line identification, learning mechanism and predictive controller. A closed-loop control system is developed and implemented to improve the performance of the power kite. The effectiveness of the proposed approach has been illustrated by numerical simulation tests.

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Model-Based Plant Design and Hierarchical Control of a Prototype Lighter-Than-Air Wind Energy System, With Experimental Flight Test Results

Cited by 69 publications

References 11 publications

A case study in experimentally-infused plant and controller optimization for airborne wind energy systems

A case study in experimentally-infused plant and controller optimization for airborne wind energy systems

A Critical Assessment of Airborne Wind Energy Systems

Predictive functional control of power kites for high altitude wind energy generation based on hybrid neural network

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