Mechanical and Civil Engineering Seminar

Mechanical and Civil Engineering Seminar Series

Title: Wind Farm Modeling and Control

Abstract: The growth of wind energy motivates new models and control designs that enable wind farms to provide the grid services that are often required of conventional generators. This talk focuses on grid services that require the wind farm to track a power signal (e.g., secondary frequency regulation). We first demonstrate that taking into account both the challenges and opportunities arising through interactions with the atmospheric boundary layer can enable wind farms to participate in frequency regulation with improved efficiency. We then focus on the dynamic interconnections within the wind farm, which we represent using an update map comprising a graph with time-varying edge connectivity that accounts for changes in the incoming wind direction and turbine yaw angles. We employ this model within a combined pitch and yaw controller for power tracking. Our results demonstrate that incorporating an outer loop yaw control can indeed reduce the required derate over pitch control alone for power tracking, however they also highlight important limitations of yaw control for this application.

Bio: Dennice F. Gayme is a Professor in Mechanical Engineering and the Carol Croft Linde Faculty Scholar at Johns Hopkins University. She received her B. Eng. & Society in Mechanical Engineering from McMaster University in 1997, an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 1998, and her Ph.D. in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology in 2010. Her research interests are in modeling, analysis and control of spatially distributed and large-scale networked systems, such as wind farms, wall-bounded shear flows, and power systems. She was a recipient of a JHU Catalyst Award in 2015, ONR Young Investigator and NSF CAREER awards in 2017, a Whiting School of Engineering Johns Hopkins Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award in 2020, and the Turbulence and Shear Flow Phenomena (TSFP12) Nobuhide Kasagi Award in 2022. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and serves as a Member-At-Large in the Executive Committee of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics (APS/DFD), the Standing Chair of the Women in Control Committee of the Control Systems Society (CSS) of the IEEE, and on the editorial boards of the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, Physical Review Fluids and PRX Energy.

NOTE: At this time, in-person Mechanical and Civil Engineering Lectures are open to all Caltech students/staff/faculty/visitors.