Aspects of control and system design for hydrokinetic turbines

水力涡轮机从流动的水源（如河流、潮汐流或工业过程的污水）中获取能量，并将其转化为电力。因此，这些涡轮机是环保的，涉及可再生能源，基本上是零碳足迹。因此，这些系统的开发可以被认为对加拿大和世界具有非常高的价值。此外，在现有流中实施流体动力涡轮机的经济效益可能是显著的。这些类型的涡轮机系统中的主要问题是维持所产生的电力的一致供应，这使从流源提取的功率最大化。为了精确地实现这些结果，需要优化控制。拟议的工作涉及开发和改进水力涡轮机的控制技术，包括垂直轴鼠笼式设计，其中涡轮机垂直于气流旋转，叶片基本上是翼状表面。这种设计的优点是不依赖于流动方向和易于启动。主要的控制挑战涉及保持一致的行为和性能，尽管在驱动流的变化（如在逆转潮汐流），并处理由于其旋转进入和离开流的叶片中的变化的扭矩。建议使用一种根据外部流动条件（如通过数学处理推断的）而变化并且同时限制扭矩脉动的控制类型。这可以通过先进的配方来实现，使用最先进的优化目标和解决方案技术，并且还使用系统对变化因素的适应。这项工作补充了风力涡轮机行业的现有成果，但有其独特的挑战，包括测量水的速度（由于污垢，极端天气和碎片堆积），更大的力和扭矩（由于与空气相比，水的能量密度）和有限的应用体积（因为河流和渠道通常很小）。该项目的成果将是朝着水力涡轮机发电主流方向迈出的重要一步。

Hydrokinetic turbines take energy from flowing water sources, such as rivers, tidal flows, or effluent from industrial processes, and convert this into electricity. As such these turbines are environmentally friendly, involve a renewable energy source and have essentially zero carbon footprint. Thus development of these systems can be considered of very high value to Canada and the world. Moreover, the economic benefit of implementing a hydrokinetic turbine in an existing flow can be significant. A major issue in these type of turbine systems is maintenance of a consistent supply of generated electricity which maximizes the power extracted from the flow source. In order to achieve precisely these results, an optimizing control is needed. The proposed work involves the development and refinement of control techniques for hydrokinetic turbines involving a vertical axis squirrel cage design where the turbine spins perpendicular to the flow and the blades are essentially wing-like surfaces. Advantages of this design are independence of flow direction and ease of start-up. The main control challenges involve maintaining consistent behaviour and performance despite changes in the driving flow (such as in reversing tidal flows), and dealing with varying torque in the blades due to their rotation into and out of the flow. It is proposed to use a type of control that varies according to the external flow conditions (as inferred by mathematical processing) and at the same time limits the torque pulsation. This can be realized with advanced formulations using state of the art optimizing goals and solution techniques, and also using adaptation of the system to the varying factors. The work complements existing results in the wind turbine industry, but has its unique challenges including measuring of the water speed (due to fouling, extreme weather, and debris build-up), much larger forces and torques (due to the energy density of water as compared to air) and limited application volumes (in that rivers and channels are generally small). The results of this project will be a major step forward towards the mainstream muse of hydrokinetic turbines for electrical power generation.