Overlapping guaranteed cost control for uncertain continuous-time delayed systems

Overlapping guaranteed cost control design problem is solved for a class of linear continuous-time uncertain systems with state as well as control delays. Unknown arbitrarily time-varying uncertainties with known bounds are considered. A point delay is supposed. Conditions preserving closed-loop systems expansion-contraction relations including the identical bounds of performance indices are proved. A linear matrix inequality (LMI) delay independent procedure is used for control design in the expanded space. The results are specialized on the overlapping decentralized control design. A numerical illustrative example is supplied.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

New offset-free method for model predictive control of open channels

Irrigation or drainage canals can be controlled by model predictive control (MPC). Applying MPC with an internal model in the presence of unknown disturbances in some cases can lead to steady state offset. Therefore an additional component should be implemented along with the MPC. A new method eliminating the offset has been developed in this paper for MPC. It is based on combining two basic approaches of MPC. It has been implemented to control water levels in the three-pool UPC laboratory canal and further numerically tested using a test case benchmark proposed by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). It has been found that the developed offset-free method is able to eliminate the steady-state offset, while taking into account known and unknown disturbances.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Pipeline-Based Power Reduction in FPGA Applications

This paper shows how temporal parallelism has an important role in the power dissipation reduction in the FPGA field. Glitches propagation is blocked by the flip-flops or registers in the pipeline. Several multiplication structures are implemented over modern FPGAs, StratixII and Virtex4, comparing their results with and without pipeline and hardware duplication

Controllability-observability of expanded composite systems

The relation between original and expanded systems within the Inclusion Principle from the point of view of controllability–observability of both subsystems and composite systems is studied. It is proved that complementary matrices always exist ensuring that the subsystems and the overall expanded system are simultaneously controllable–observable. Two practically important large classes of complementary matrices are identified to offer results computationally attractive. First, the existence of complementary matrices ensuring controllability–observability of decoupled subsystems is proved. Then, using this result, the same property is proved for the composite expanded system.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A design procedure for overlapped guaranteed cost controllers

© 2008 the authors. This work has been accepted to IFAC for publication under a Creative Commons Licence CC-BY-NC-NDIn this paper a quadratic guaranteed cost control problem for a class of linear continuous-time state-delay systems with norm-bounded uncertainties is considered. We will suppose that the systems are composed by two overlapped subsystems but the results can be easily extended to any number of subsystems. The main objective is to design overlapping guaranteed cost controllers with tridiagonal gain matrices for these kind of systems by using a linear matrix inequality (LMI) approach. With this idea in mind, we present a design strategy to reduce the computational burden and to increase the feasibility in the LMI problem. In this context, the use of so-called complementary matrices play an important role. A simple example to illustrate the advantages achieved by using the proposed method is supplied.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Hysteresis-based design of dynamic reference trajectories to avoid saturation in controlled wind turbines

The main objective of this paper is to design a dynamic reference trajectory based on hysteresis to avoid saturation in controlled wind turbines. Basically, the torque controller and pitch controller set-points are hysteretically manipulated to avoid saturation and drive the system with smooth dynamic changes. Simulation results obtained from a 5MW wind turbine benchmark model show that our proposed strategy has a clear added value with respect to the baseline controller (a well-known and accepted industrial wind turbine controller). Moreover, the proposed strategy has been tested in healthy conditions but also in the presence of a realistic fault where the baseline controller caused saturation to nally conduct to instability.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Wind turbines controllers design based on the super-twisting algorithm

The continuous increase in the size of wind turbines (WTs) has led to new challenges in the design of novel torque and pitch controllers. Today’s WT control design must fulfill numerous specifications to assure effective electrical energy production and to hold the tower vibrations inside acceptable levels of operation. Hence, this paper presents modern torque and pitch control developments based on the super-twisting algorithm (STA) by using feedback of the fore- aft and side-to-side acceleration signals of the WT tower. According to numerical experiments realized using FAST, these controllers mitigate vibrations in the tower without affecting the quality of electrical power production. Moreover, the proposed controllers’ performance is better than the baseline controllers used for comparison.Postprint (author's final draft

Acceleration-based fault-tolerant control design of offshore fixed wind turbines

Wind turbines (WTs) are basically controlled by varying the generator load torque (with the so-called torque control) and the blade pitch angles (with the so-called pitch control) based on measurement of the generator shaft speed. These two controllers unitedly work to satisfy the control objectives, and it is crucial that they are tolerant to possible faults in the WT system. Passive fault-tolerant control comprises the design of robust controllers against disturbances and uncertainties. This enables the controller to counteract the effect of a fault without requiring reconfiguration or fault detection. In this regard, the main contribution of this paper is to propose new control techniques that not only provide fault tolerance capabilities to the WT system but also improve the overall performance of the system in both fault-free and faulty conditions. Coupling nonlinear aero-hydro-servo-elastic simulations of an offshore WT with jacket platform is carried out for several pitch actuator faults. The jacket platform motions and structural loads caused by fault events with the proposed controllers are compared with loads encountered during normal operation and with respect to a well-known baseline controller in the literature. The proposed controllers are based in the super-twisting algorithm by using feedback of the generator shaft speed as well as the fore-aft and side-to-side acceleration signals of the WT tower.Preprin

Fault tolerant control design of floating offshore wind turbines

This work is concerned with active vibration mitigation in wind turbines (WT) but not through the use of specifically tailored devices. Instead, a general control scheme is designed for torque and pitch controllers based on a super-twisting algorithm, which uses additional feedback of the fore-aft and side-to-side acceleration signals at the top of the WT tower to mitigate the vibrational behavior. In general, proposed methods to improve damping through pitch and torque control suffer from increased blade pitch actuator usage. However, in this work the blade pitch angle is smoothed leading to a decrease of the pitch actuator effort, among other benefits evidenced through numerical experiments. The most frequent faults induce vibrations in the corresponding WT subsystems. In fact, vibration monitoring has been recently used for fault diagnosis Thus, by means of vibration mitigation, different faulty conditions can be alleviated leading to a passive fault tolerant control. In this work, coupled non-linear aero-hydro- servo-elastic simulations of a floating offshore wind turbine are carried out for one of the most common pitch actuator faults.Postprint (published version