Dynamics and Control with Applications to Ocean Renewables

Dear Colleagues,

Ocean renewables include wave, tidal, and ocean thermal and salinity gradients, offshore winds, among others. Driven by the need for zero-carbon emissions and complementing the increasing penetration of wind and solar energy, there is a significant growing interest in developing technologies to harness the vast available ocean renewable energies. However, ocean renewable technology is still cost-intensive in terms of the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) and subject to a high level of uncertainty. Accordingly, outstanding efforts have been made by the research community to develop dynamics and control of ocean renewables with applications. More specifically, high-fidelity numerical models provide an accurate prediction of the ocean renewable resources, device dynamic responses, and environmental impacts, which significantly benefit the design and assessment of ocean renewable technologies. On the other hand, computationally efficient and accurate reduced-order models are critical for control developers. Marine structures are often subject to large loads and undesirable vibrations, which may lead to reduced efficiency in energy production and fatigue life. Identifying a numerical model to accurately and efficiently represent these strong nonlinearities is a challenging problem. Additionally, appropriate control systems can maximize the energy conversion efficiency and reduce the structure loads of an ocean renewable energy system, which is identified as the key enabler for a reduced LCOE. Meanwhile, designing an effective, robust, and adaptive control method subject to nonlinearities and constantly changing sea conditions is also a challenging problem.

This Special Issue will focus on new approaches for the modeling, simulation, and control of ocean renewable energy systems. Topics of interest for publication include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Ocean renewable resource modeling and assessment;
• High-fidelity hydrodynamic and aerodynamic modeling;
• Model reduction for ocean renewable energy systems;
• Modeling from resource to wire, including simulation frameworks developed for blue economy applications;
• Array model, simulation, control, and optimization;
• Design of ocean renewable subsystems (e.g., power take-off, mooring, floating platforms, etc.);
• Energy maximizing and fault tolerance control, including machine learning-based methods;
• Control co-design of ocean renewable systems;
• Structural integrity and survivability.

Dr. Shangyan Zou
Guest Editor

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• resource modeling
• hydrodynamics and aerodynamics
• model reduction
• resource-to-wire modeling
• ocean renewable arrays
• power take-off
• control algorithms
• control co-design
• structural integrity