Brief Research Summary

Over the last years, conventional wind turbines have grown in size and mass up to a scale at which the major challenges are posed by the structural loads. The main idea behind Airborne Wind Energy (AWE) is to eliminate all the elements of the system which are not essential for power extraction, resulting in a much lighter structure that only involves an airfoil tethered to the ground. In this configuration, higher altitudes can be reached and the swept area is not fixed by the structure of the system, but can be optimized so as to maximize the extracted power. While the potential of this technology has been demonstrated in several publications, the main challenge comes from the necessity to control a fast, constrained and strongly nonlinear system. More details can be found on http://www.highwind.be.

Video taken from http://www.highwind.be

Publications

Journal:

  1. J. De Schutter, M. Zanon and M. Diehl. TuneMPC – A Tool for Economic Tuning of Tracking (N)MPC Problems. IEEE Control System Letters, 2020
  2. S. Gros and M. Zanon. Numerical Periodic Optimal Control in the Presence of Invariants. IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 2018
  3. M. Zanon, S. Gros, J. Andersson and M. Diehl. Airborne Wind Energy Based on Dual Airfoils. IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, 2013

Conference:

  1. E. Malz, M. Zanon and S. Gros. A Quantification of the Performance Loss of Power Averaging in Airborne Wind Energy Farms. Proceedings of the European Control Conference (ECC), 2018
  2. M. Zanon, G. Horn, S. Gros and M. Diehl. Control of Dual-Airfoil Airborne Wind Energy Systems Based on Nonlinear MPC and MHE. Proceedings of the European Control Conference (ECC), 2014
  3. M. Zanon, S. Gros, J. Meyers and M. Diehl. Airborne Wind Energy: Airfoil-Airmass Interaction. Proceedings of the World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control, 2014
  4. M. Zanon, S. Gros and M. Diehl. Rotational Start-up of Tethered Airplanes Based on Nonlinear MPC and MHE. Proceedings of the European Control Conference (ECC), 2013
  5. S. Gros, M. Zanon, and M. Diehl. Control of Airborne Wind Energy Systems Based on Nonlinear Model Predictive Control & Moving Horizon Estimation. Proceedings of the European Control Conference (ECC), 2013
  6. S. Gros, M. Zanon, and M. Diehl. A Relaxation Strategy for the Optimization of Airborne Wind Energy Systems. Proceedings of the European Control Conference (ECC), 2013
  7. S. Gros, M. Zanon, M. Vukov and M. Diehl. Nonlinear MPC and MHE for Mechanical Multi-Body Systems with Application to Fast Tethered Airplanes. Proceedings of the IFAC Conference on Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC), 2012
  8. S. Gros, M. Zanon and M. Diehl. Orbit Control for a Power Generating Airfoil based on Nonlinear MPC. Proceedings of the American Control Conference (ACC), 2012

Book Chapters:

  1. M. Zanon, S. Gros and M. Diehl. Control of Rigid-Airfoil Airborne Wind Energy Systems. Airborne Wind Energy, Springer, 2013
  2. K. Geebelen, M. Vukov, A. Wagner, H. Ahmad, M. Zanon, S. Gros, D. Vandepitte, J. Swevers, M. Diehl. An experimental test setup for advanced estimation and control of an airborne wind energy system. Airborne Wind Energy, Springer, 2013
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