LEAP-HI: US-Ireland R&D Partnership: Control Co-Design for Ocean Wave Energy Conversion

联合国将本世纪20年代定为“海洋科学促进可持续发展十年”。在美国、爱尔兰和英国漫长的海岸线上，海浪代表着一种巨大的、未开发的高密度能源。据估计，波浪能至少有可能满足美国三分之一的电力需求。尽管波浪能提供电力的潜力巨大，但波浪能转换在世界范围内仍处于起步阶段，迄今为止没有一种波浪能转换器（WEC）得到广泛接受。这个美国繁荣、健康和基础设施领先工程（LEAP-HI）项目将研究以综合方式设计实用波浪能转换系统所需的基础理论和设计工具。从早期概念设计和组件创新到系统集成和现场验证，整个协同设计过程将由来自三个国家的五名研究人员通过跨学科合作完成。波浪能转换研究的成功将有助于缓解全球能源危机，应对气候变化，缓解环境担忧，加速蓝色经济发展，造福社会。它还将作为一个示范，激发全球合作，解决全球能源可持续性危机，并在新兴的蓝色经济领域建立美欧合作领导地位。为了有效地将能量从波浪转化为电线，需要多学科研究，包括将振荡的不规则波浪能捕获为机械能的捕波结构（WCS），将机械能转换为电能的电源输出（PTO）子系统，以及使设备适应不规则波浪激励并优化功率捕获的先进控制。这些模块中的每一个都需要特定于领域的专业知识，这些专业知识通常由领域专家按顺序处理。这种顺序设计范式忽略了WCS流体动力学、PTO动力学和系统控制之间的强耦合，通常会导致次优甚至不可行的设计。这个跨学科的研究项目旨在通过测试和验证一种全新的控制协同设计方法来建立一个集成的设计范式，通过主动机械运动校正（AMMR）、嵌套协同优化和高级控制来创建相互高效的PTO和WCS。该计划是一种颠覆性的范式转换，从常见的顺序“设计然后控制”方法到并行的“为控制而设计”和“为设计而控制”方法，以整体设计和优化整个WEC设备的几何形状、系统布局、PTO和控制系统，以显着提高性能。这项研究将为耦合建模、设计和控制WEC系统创造基础知识和工具，以推动波浪能转换技术的融合。这项研究将通过多方面的技术和专业技能培训、国际实习、为代表性不足的少数民族和妇女提供机会，以及为K-12和社区大学学生提供独特的实践经验，影响四所大学的教育质量和多样性。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The United Nations has designated the 2020s as the “Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development”. Along the long coastlines of the US, Ireland, and the UK, ocean waves represent a vast, untapped, high-density power source. It has been estimated that wave energy has the potential to supply at least one third of US electricity demand. In spite of the huge potential of wave energy to provide power, wave energy conversion is still in its infancy worldwide with none of the wave energy converters (WEC) to date achieving widespread acceptance. This Leading Engineering for America's Prosperity, Health, and Infrastructure (LEAP-HI) project will research the fundamental theory and design tools needed to design practical wave energy converter systems in an integrated fashion. It will be completed through interdisciplinary collaboration of five investigators across three countries throughout the co-design process, from early concept design and components innovation to system integration and field validation. The success of the research on wave energy conversion will help mitigate the global energy crisis, combat climate change, relieve environmental concerns, accelerate blue economy development, and benefit society. It will also serve as a demonstration to inspire worldwide collaborations to solve the global crisis of energy sustainability and establish US-European collaborative leadership in the emerging field of the blue economy. For WECs to efficiently convert energy from wave to wire, multidisciplinary research is required, including a wave capture structure (WCS) to capture the oscillating irregular wave energy as mechanical energy, a power take-off (PTO) subsystem to convert mechanical energy into electricity, and advanced control to adapt the device to irregular wave excitations and optimize power capture. Each of these modules takes domain-specific expertise, which is conventionally addressed sequentially by domain experts. Such a sequential design paradigm neglects the strong couplings among WCS hydrodynamics, PTO dynamics, and system control, which generally results in a sub-optimal or even infeasible design. This transdisciplinary research project aims to establish an integrated design paradigm by testing and validating a radically new control co-design approach to create mutually-efficient PTO and WCS, with active mechanical motion rectification (AMMR), nested co-optimization, and advanced control. The program is a disruptive paradigm switch from the common sequential “design and then control” approach to a concurrent “design for control” and “control for design” approach to holistically design and optimize the entire WEC device’s geometry, system layout, PTO, and control system for significantly improved performance. This research will create fundamental knowledge and tools for coupled modelling, design and control of the WEC system to drive the convergence of wave energy conversion technologies. The research will impact the quality and diversity of education at four universities through multidimensional technical and professional skill trainings, international internships, opportunities for underrepresented minorities and women, and unique hands-on experiences for K-12 and community college students.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.