The development of Floating Off-shore Wind Turbines (FOWTs) is necessary to extract wind energy beyond 50m sea depth and thus take advantage of deep-water wind conditions. Yet, this poses a real technical challenge because FOWTs are subject to significant structural loads due to the platform motion under turbulent winds and waves. Control algorithms are generally developed at the end, that is to say, once the system to be controlled is already built. But the researchers believe that more optimal solutions could be obtained if control concepts were used to design the whole system.
For the past two years, our lab has been part of a DOE\ARPA-E funded multidisciplinary project to develop OpenTurbineCoDe, an open-source control co-design framework, for designing highly efficient and cost-effective FOWTs.
Juan and Xianping worked on the control sub-module of this framework.
There is a series of videos presenting this framework on youtube.