Adding feedforward blade pitch control to standard feedback controllers for load mitigation in wind turbines

Combined feedback/feedforward blade pitch control is compared to industry standard feedback control when simulated in realistic turbulent winds. The feedforward controllers are designed to reduce fatigue loads, increasing turbine lifetime and therefore reducing the cost of energy. Two feedforward designs are studied: collective-pitch model-inverse feedforward using a non-causal series expansion and individual-pitch gain-scheduled shaped compensator. The input to the feedforward controller is a measurement of incoming wind speed, which could potentially be provided by LIDAR. Three of the designs reduce structural loading compared to standard feedback control, without reducing power production.     

基于压电陶瓷的风机叶片模型覆冰主动监测

南方山区高湿低温严酷环境易导致冰灾,风机叶片覆冰会导致发电效率降低甚至停机,因此发展高效可靠的风机叶片覆冰监测技术对防冰、除冰具有重要意义。该文提出了一种基于压电陶瓷应力波测量的风机叶片覆冰主动监测方法。开展叶片模型进行模拟覆冰试验,在叶片表面布置伸缩型和剪切型两种压电陶瓷片,根据波动法原理对驱动器输入正弦扫频电压信号作为激励,记录不同传感器在不同结冰厚度下的响应信号,并对测量信号进行小波包能量分析。结果表明,同一压电陶瓷片接收信号的小波包能量与结冰厚度存在明显关系。     

Control strategies for enhanced power smoothing in wind energysystems using a flywheel driven by a vector-controlled induction machine

This paper presents a novel control strategy for power smoothing in wind energy applications, especially those feeding a stand-alone load. The system is based on a vector-controlled induction machine driving a flywheel and addresses the problem of regulating the DC-link system voltage against both input power surges/sags from a wind turbine or sudden changes in load demand. The control is based on a feedforward compensation scheme augmented by a nonlinear controller. Two feedforward compensation schemes are discussed and the limitations and performance of each scheme are analyzed. Experimental results are presented which verify the excellent performance of the feedforward compensation technique     

Adaptive Empirical Path Loss Prediction Models for Indoor WLAN

This paper presents robust empirical path loss models to characterize indoor propagation for access point (AP) deployed at different heights. The proposed models are developed with wireless local area network infrastructure at 2.4 GHz. The models are backed by extensive received signal strength (RSS) measurements acquired in line of sight and obstructed line of sight regions. The models are developed for two conditions, viz; quasi realistic and realistic RSS measurements. The quasi realistic measurements are taken after suppressing human intervention and electrical interferences to minimum. While the realistic RSS measurements are made in presence of all the human interventions and electrical interferences. The shadow fading component for both quasi realistic and realistic conditions is statistically modeled with the dependency on AP height. The proposed technique can be applied with higher confidence level to the buildings with similar construction features where RSS measurements are made upon. The results reveal that the performance of the proposed propagation models is significantly higher than the existing International Telecommunication Union-path loss model. The results also demonstrate that the realistic path loss model is more robust than the quasi realistic model.     

On Bayesian scatterometer wind inversion

In a quest for a generic unbiased scatterometer wind inversion method, the different inversion procedures currently in use are revisited in this paper. A careful examination of both the errors in the wind and in the measurement domain, combined with the nonlinear shape of the geophysical model function (GMF), leads to a generic and novel Bayesian wind retrieval approach in the measurement domain. In this approach the shape of the GMF solution manifold in measurement space is more important than the specified noise. This shape is related to the system wind direction sensitivity, and when this sensitivity is uniform, realistic and precise wind direction distributions are retrieved, even when measurements lie far from the GMF manifold. A simplified measurement space transformation that produces such uniform sensitivity for the European Remote Sensing Satellite (ERS) scatterometer is presented and shown to have reduced wind direction bias compared to the more traditional (measurement-noise normalized) inversion for ERS. Moreover, the simplified wind inversion reveals a similar performance to the current operational ERS wind inversion, but is potentially more generally applicable. The simplified method is then applied to SeaWinds but is ineffective. In this case the instrument geometry results in a low sensitivity to wind direction at a few specific directions. As a consequence, certain wind direction solutions remain favored in the SeaWinds inversion.     

Effect of Impeller Solidity on the Generating Performance for Solar Power Generation

According to current solar power research, both the generating unit’s minimum start-up speed and power generation system’s minimum flow rate for operation decrease with the increase in the impeller solidity. Ideally, a high solidity should be achieved, as this translates more power for a solar power system in the start-up and shut-down cycles. However, increasing the number of blades does not increase the impeller solidity; therefore, there is an optimal number of blades needed to achieve the preferred solidity. This paper begins by selecting the blade airfoil and then performs a theoretical analysis based on the relationship between the blade number and chord length. Experiments are conducted to measure the starting and stopping wind speeds and power characteristics for different numbers of blades. The results show that a maximum impeller solidity of 0.2862 is achieved, as well as the minimum flow speed at the start-up, and the maintenance of the solar chimney power generation system is optimized when there are four blades.     

风轮机叶片电磁散射特性的占比分析与解析模型的建立

针对风轮机叶片雷达散射截面积的变化特性,分析了风轮机叶片雷达散射截面积（Radar Cross Section, RCS）对其整体雷达散射特性占比情况,实现对叶片解析模型适用范围的选取。考虑了风轮机叶片旋转平面与雷达视线（Line of Sight, LOS）夹角、叶片材料、叶片几何形状等因素对风轮机散射特性的影响,运用UG软件对风轮机叶片进行三维建模,利用真实叶片与相应简化圆柱叶片电磁散射特性的差异构建高保真的风轮机真实叶片电磁散射特性的解析模型,实现风轮机叶片RCS的快速计算。最后将解析模型计算结果与实测数据进行对比,验证了论文给出的真实叶片电磁散射特性解析模型的有效性。      

Weakly coherent optical systems using lasers with significant phasenoise

Current theories for coherent receiver performance as affected by phase noise are compared, the main prediction of these theories are highlighted, and the reasons why many coherent system experiments have failed to approach the level of performance which is theoretically possible are considered. Different theoretical predictions are compared under idealized receiver conditions concerning the appropriate IF bandwidth, the penalty in receiver sensitivity resulting from laser phase noise, and other system properties. In general, good agreement is found. It is shown how these results differ for realistic receiver parameters, and optimized front-end design using tuning of parasitics is suggested     

Coriolis mass-flow meter with integrated multi-DOF active vibration isolation

Vibration isolation of more than 40 dB is achieved for a Coriolis Mass-Flow Meter (CMFM) with integrated Active Vibration Isolation. A CMFM is an active device based on the Coriolis force principle for direct mass-flow measurements independent of fluid properties. The mass-flow measurement is derived from tube displacement measurements. Support excitations can introduce motions that cannot be distinguished from the Coriolis force induced motion, thus introducing a measurement error. Therefore, the measurement stage is passively suspended at 30 Hz in the 3 out-of-plane directions. Active vibration isolation is added to increase the attenuation. In this paper the system model and controller design are presented. Based on the model an on-scale proof of principle is built and the model and controller are validated in multi-DOF. Acceleration feedback and a novel adaptive feedforward control strategy are compared A filtered-reference least-mean-square (FxLMS) adaptive scheme is used to determine the optimal feedforward controller parameters to minimise a squared error signal; the motion of the measurement stage. Both strategies result in an attenuation of 10 – 20 dB at 175 Hz in addition to the 30 dB attenuation obtained by the 30 Hz passive vibration isolation stage. The performance of the feedback strategy is limited by robust stability and the the feedforward performance is limited by sensor noise.     

Fast data-derived fundamental spheroidal excitation models with application to UXO discrimination

Current idealized forward models for electromagnetic induction (EMI) response can be defeated by the characteristic material and geometrical heterogeneity of realistic unexploded ordnance (UXO). A new, physically complete modeling system was developed that includes all effects of these heterogeneities and their interactions within the object, in both near and far fields. The model is fast enough for implementation in inversion processing algorithms. A method is demonstrated for extracting the model parameters by straightforward processing of data from a defined measurement protocol. Depending on the EMI sensor used for measurements, the process of inferring model parameters is more or less ill-posed. More complete data can alleviate the problem. For a given set of data, special numerical treatment is introduced to take the best advantage of the data and obtain reliable model parameters. The resulting fast model is implemented in a pattern matching treatment of measurements by which signals from a UXO are identified within a series of those from unknown targets. Preliminary results show that this fast model is promising for use in processing of this kind. The inherent difficulties of target identification are examined, and solutions for resolving these difficulties are discussed.     

Measurement selection for parametric IC fault diagnosis

This article presents experimental results which show feedforward neural networks are well-suited for analog IC fault diagnosis. Boundary band data (BBD) measurement selection is used to reduce the computational overhead of the FFN training phase. We compare the diagnostic accuracy between traditional statistical classifiers and feedforward neural networks trained with various measurement selection criteria. The feedforward networks consistently perform as well as or better than the other classifiers in term of accuracy. Training using BBD consistently reduces the FFN training efforts without degrading the performance. Experimental results suggest that feedforward networks provide a cost efficient method for IC fault diagnosis in a large scale production testing environment.This work is supported by NSF-IUC CDADIC, Project 90-1.     

Neural network based uniformity profile control of linear chemical-mechanical planarization

In this paper, a neural network based uniformity controller is developed for the linear chemical-mechanical planarization (CMP) process. The control law utilizes the metrology measurements of the wafer uniformity profile and tunes the pressures of different air-bearing zones on Lam linear CMP polishers. A feedforward neural network is used to self-learn the CMP process model and a direct inverse control with neural network is utilized to regulate the process to the target. Simulation and experimental results are presented to illustrate the control system performance. Compared with the results by using statistical surface response methods (SRM), the proposed control system can give more accurate uniformity profiles and more flexibility.     

Experience with bicoherence of electrical power for conditionmonitoring of wind turbine blades

The authors explore the application of the normalised bispectrum or bicoherence to the problem of condition monitoring of wind turbine blades. Background information is provided on this type of condition monitoring, how it differs from more conventional condition monitoring of turbo machinery, and the motivation for selecting bicoherence. Bicoherence is defined and compared with the power spectral density. Complications in collecting suitable data, and estimating the bicoherence from that data are investigated; including the requirements of very long stationary data sets for consistent estimates, and computational difficulties in handling such large data sets. Bicoherence is then applied to electrical power output data obtained from a 45 kW wind turbine. The turbine is operated in three configurations to represent normal and fault conditions. A blade with less flapwise stiffness but identical outer dimensions to the matched set of blades was fitted to simulate a damaged blade. Comparison of the results from the power spectral density and bicoherence indicates how the bicoherence might be employed for condition monitoring purposes. Slices of the bicoherence with one frequency fixed at the rate of rotation show clear differences between the configurations and substantially reduce the computational effort required to calculate the estimate     

车载测风激光雷达风廓线同步观测实验

多普勒测风激光雷达能够实现高时空分辨率的大气风场测量,中国海洋大学成功研制了可以测量风廓线和三维大气风场的车载多普勒测风激光雷达,并已交付中国气象局使用。为了检验该激光雷达的测量性能,2011年春季开展了车载激光雷达与探空气球风廓线同步观测实验,获取了55组比对数据。本文介绍了此次同步观测实验,给出了激光雷达和探空气球风廓线数据的比对个例,并对所有比对数据进行了统计分析。同步比对结果显示,激光雷达与探空气球风廓线数据的风速均方根偏差为2.76 m/s。通过分析比对偏差,证明了激光雷达风廓线测量结果的准确性。     

Land-Contamination Compensation for QuikSCAT Near-Coastal Wind Retrieval

The QuikSCAT scatterometer is used to accurately retrieve winds over the ocean at both high (2.5 km) and low (25 km) resolutions. In near-coastal regions, land contamination of measurements results in inaccurate wind estimates using current techniques. Here, we show that identifying land-contaminated measurements allows wind retrieval to be accurately achieved in near-coastal regions using QuikSCAT data at up to 2.5-km resolution using the AVE algorithm. To identify and remove land contamination, two metrics are compared, namely, the minimum distance to land and the land contribution ratio (LCR). The LCR is used as a metric to identify and remove land-contaminated backscatter $sigma^{o}$ measurements before wind retrieval by discarding measurements with LCR values above a threshold. LCR thresholds used to remove land-contaminated measurements are determined using Monte Carlo simulations and set during processing using a lookup table based on the local wind speed, land brightness, and the cross-track swath location. Wind retrieval from $sigma^{o}$ fields generated using the LCR is more accurate closer to the coast than previously achieved using both low- and high-resolution processing.      

大型风电叶片动态摄影测量网络优化

在大型风电叶片动态摄影测量中,为了对相机的站位进行优化,采用一种变异操作改进型遗传算法作为摄影测量网络优化方法,通过光线束前方交会的误差传递建立测量误差模型,以空间坐标测量误差的标准差为网络优化的目标,同时根据被测风电叶片几何结构和实际环境确定了相应的约束条件进行仿真实验,得到了最优的相机站位。结果表明,在以叶片长度为40m的风机为被测物的仿真实验中,最优站位的空间坐标测量误差标准差为2.7mm;通过对叶片长度为3.5m的风机模型进行实测实验验证,最优站位的相对测量误差为0.009%,最大误差为0.617mm。该研究为风电叶片摄影测量的网络优化提供了参考。     

A C-Band Wind/Rain Backscatter Model

With the confirmed evidence of rain surface perturbation in recent studies, the rain effects on C-band scatterometer measurements are reevaluated. By using colocated Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission Precipitation Radar, ESCAT on European Remote Sensing Satellites, and European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts data, we evaluate the sensitivity of C-band sigmadeg to rain. We develop a low-order wind/rain backscatter model with inputs of surface rain rate, incidence angle, wind speed, wind direction, and azimuth angle. We demonstrate that the wind/rain backscatter model is accurate enough for describing the total backscatter in raining areas with relatively low variance. We also show that the rain surface perturbation is a dominating factor of the rain-induced backscatter. Using three distinct regimes, we show under what conditions the wind, rain, and both wind and rain can be retrieved from the measurements. We find that the effect of rain has a more significant impact on the measurements at high incidence angles than at low incidence angles     

Ein neues Vorfilter zur Verbesserung des Folgeverhaltens von Bewegungsregelungen

The tracking error of motion control systems which should guarantee high precision — for example considering machine tools — can be considerably reduced by the use of a feedforward filter. The feedforward filter G_v(z^?1) should carry out the compensation of the poles and zeros of the transfer function G_cl(z^?1) of the motion control system. As far as motion control is concerned this compensation is not feasible, since the transfer function G_cl(z^?1) of this kind of control systems has usually unstable or limit-stable zeros. Different methods of feedforward filter designs are known, which also achieve in the case of noncompensable zeros a remarkable performance improvement. Most commonly used is the so called zero phase error tracking (ZPET)-feedforward filter. ZPET-prefiltering leads to phase zero of the frequency response of the overall transfer function G_v(z^?1) G_cl(z^?1) within the whole frequency range. This article introduces a new feedforward concept, which is easy to design and is a result of time domain considerations. The reported investigations show that this feedforward concept leads not only in theory but also under realistic circumstances to a quite reduced tracking error compared to the ZPET-feedforward filter.     

Accuracy of scatterometer-derived winds using the Cramer-Rao bound

A wind scatterometer makes measurements of the normalized radar-backscatter coefficient σ° of the ocean surface. To retrieve the wind, a geophysical model function (GMF), which relates σ° to the near-surface wind, is used. The wind vector can be estimated using maximum-likelihood techniques from several σ° measurements made at different azimuth angles. The probability density of the measured σ° is assumed to be Gaussian with a variance that depends on the true σ° and therefore, depends on the wind through the GMF. With this model for wind estimation, the Cramer-Rao (C-R) bound is derived for wind estimation, and its implications for wind retrieval are discussed. As part of this discussion, the role of geophysical modeling error is considered and shown to play a significant role in the performance of near-surface wind estimates. The C-R bound is illustrated using parameters from the ERS AMI, NSCAT, and Sea Winds scatterometers     

Simulations of short-time diffusivity in lung airspaces and implications for S/V measurements using hyperpolarized-gas MRI

We demonstrate a method for simulating restricted diffusion of hyperpolarized gases in lung airspaces that does not rely on an idealized analytic model of alveolar structure. Instead, the restricting geometry was generated from digital representations of histological sections of actual lung tissue obtained from a rabbit model of emphysema. Monte-Carlo simulations of restricted diffusion were performed in the short-time-scale regime, for which the time-dependent diffusivity is quantitatively related to the surface-to-volume ratio (S/V) of the pore space. In each of the eight samples studied, the S/V extracted from the simulated time-dependent diffusivity curves differed by less than 3% from direct assessment of S/V using image-processing methods. Simulated MRI measurements of apparent diffusion coefficients (ADCs) were performed in three representative lung sections to determine the effect of realistic gradient pulse shapes on the extracted S/V values. It was confirmed that ADCs measured at short diffusion times using either narrow or square gradient pulses yield accurate S/V values based on previously derived theoretical relationships. Simulations of triangular and sinusoidal diffusion-sensitizing gradients were then used to quantify the modifications required to extract accurate S/V values from ADC measurements obtained using more realistic gradient waveforms.