System Design and Operation: Reliability-based and Control Co-Design of Marine Renewable Energy

Project Lead: Yufei Tang, Ph.D.
Affiliated Home Campus: Boca Raton
Affiliated Department: Computer and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Marine renewable energy (MRE) turbine is still in its infancy, for example, for the capture of ocean flows, the fluid velocity is low but density is high, resulting in early boundary layer separation and high torque. Moreover, the corrosive marine environment adds to the life-cycle costs. Conventional sequential turbine design paradigm neglects the strong couplings among hydrodynamics, power take-off (PTO), control systems, and maintainability of those devices, which generally results in a sub-optimal design. This REU project aims to establish methodologies using artificial intelligence (AI) for an integrated design paradigm, by testing a new reliability-based control co-design approach to create a mutually efficient PTO and MRE capture structure to significantly improve the efficiency, increase the power output, and decrease the operational and maintenance costs.

The project will provide a meaningful experience for the participant, while contributing to Dr. Tang’s ongoing work in this area (see Dr. Tang’s research website http://faculty.eng.fau.edu/tangy/). Selected participants will develop engineering skill sets related to marine renewable energy generation, data analytics, and machine learning. Each of these skill sets will be exercised when developing numerical techniques, while the student is simultaneously introduced to the emerging marine renewable energy field. The student will be introduced to machine learning and data mining as this project will be specifically tailored to evaluate advanced AI algorithms for forward and inverse design. Soft skills will be advanced during this internship through the preparation of a final report summarizing their research and findings, through the development and delivery of one or more presentations, and likely through the development of a conference/journal publication. This work is the continuation of previous REU site efforts by multiple Undergraduate Researchers under the supervision of Yufei Tang (see 2018-2021 “Projects and Participants” on this website).