1,196 research outputs found

    Optimal control and robust estimation for ocean wave energy converters

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    This thesis deals with the optimal control of wave energy converters and some associated observer design problems. The first part of the thesis will investigate model predictive control of an ocean wave energy converter to maximize extracted power. A generic heaving converter that can have both linear dampers and active elements as a power take-off system is considered and an efficient optimal control algorithm is developed for use within a receding horizon control framework. The optimal control is also characterized analytically. A direct transcription of the optimal control problem is also considered as a general nonlinear program. A variation of the projected gradient optimization scheme is formulated and shown to be feasible and computationally inexpensive compared to a standard nonlinear program solver. Since the system model is bilinear and the cost function is not convex quadratic, the resulting optimization problem is shown not to be a quadratic program. Results are compared with other methods like optimal latching to demonstrate the improvement in absorbed power under irregular sea condition simulations. In the second part, robust estimation of the radiation forces and states inherent in the optimal control of wave energy converters is considered. Motivated by this, low order H∞ observer design for bilinear systems with input constraints is investigated and numerically tractable methods for design are developed. A bilinear Luenberger type observer is formulated and the resulting synthesis problem reformulated as that for a linear parameter varying system. A bilinear matrix inequality problem is then solved to find nominal and robust quadratically stable observers. The performance of these observers is compared with that of an extended Kalman filter. The robustness of the observers to parameter uncertainty and to variation in the radiation subsystem model order is also investigated. This thesis also explores the numerical integration of bilinear control systems with zero-order hold on the control inputs. Making use of exponential integrators, exact to high accuracy integration is proposed for such systems. New a priori bounds are derived on the computational complexity of integrating bilinear systems with a given error tolerance. Employing our new bounds on computational complexity, we propose a direct exponential integrator to solve bilinear ODEs via the solution of sparse linear systems of equations. Based on this, a novel sparse direct collocation of bilinear systems for optimal control is proposed. These integration schemes are also used within the indirect optimal control method discussed in the first part.Open Acces

    State estimation for bilinear systems through minimizing the covariance matrix of the state estimation errors

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    This paper considers the state estimation problem of bilinear systems in the presence of disturbances. The standard Kalman filter is recognized as the best state estimator for linear systems, but it is not applicable for bilinear systems. It is well known that the extended Kalman filter (EKF) is proposed based on the Taylor expansion to linearize the nonlinear model. In this paper, we show that the EKF method is not suitable for bilinear systems because the linearization method for bilinear systems cannot describe the behavior of the considered system. Therefore, this paper proposes a state filtering method for the single-input–single-output bilinear systems by minimizing the covariance matrix of the state estimation errors. Moreover, the state estimation algorithm is extended to multiple-input–multiple-output bilinear systems. The performance analysis indicates that the state estimates can track the true states. Finally, the numerical examples illustrate the specific performance of the proposed method
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