Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

Biography

Biography: Silvio Simani

Abstract

The motivation for this talk proposal comes from a real need to have an overview about the challenges of modeling and
control for very demanding systems, such as wind turbine systems, which require reliability, availability, maintainability
and safety over power conversion effi ciency. Th ese issues have begun to stimulate research and development in the wide
control community particularly for these installations that need a high degree of sustainability. Note that this topic represents
a key point mainly for off shore wind turbines with very large rotors, since they are characterized by challenging modeling
and control problems as well as expensive and safety critical maintenance works. In this case, a clear confl ict exists between
ensuring a high degree of availability and reducing maintenance times, which aff ect the fi nal energy cost. On the other hand,
wind turbines have highly nonlinear dynamics with a stochastic and uncontrollable driving force as input in the form of wind
speed, thus representing an interesting challenge also from the modeling point of view. Suitable control methods can provide a
sustainable optimization of the energy conversion effi ciency over wider than normally expected working conditions. Moreover,
a proper mathematical description of the wind turbine system should be able to capture the complete behavior of the process
under monitoring, thus providing an important impact on the control design itself. In this way, the control scheme could
guarantee prescribed performance, whilst also giving a degree of tolerance to possible deviation of characteristic properties
or system parameters from standard conditions, if properly included in the wind turbine model itself. Th e most important
developments in advanced controllers for wind turbines are addressed and open problems in the areas of modeling of wind
turbines are also outlined.