Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Physics-Based Machine Learning Methods For Control And Sensing In Fish-Like Robots, Colin Rodwell

All Dissertations

Underwater robots are important for the construction and maintenance of underwater infrastructure, underwater resource extraction, and defense. However, they currently fall far behind biological swimmers such as fish in agility, efficiency, and sensing capabilities. As a result, mimicking the capabilities of biological swimmers has become an area of significant research interest. In this work, we focus specifically on improving the control and sensing capabilities of fish-like robots.

Our control work focuses on using the Chaplygin sleigh, a two-dimensional nonholonomic system which has been used to model fish-like swimming, as part of a curriculum to train a reinforcement learning agent to …

Theoretical Modeling, Experimental Observation, And Reliability Analysis Of Flow-Induced Oscillations In Offshore Wind Turbine Blades, Pariya Pourazarm

Doctoral Dissertations

Offshore wind energy has been growing rapidly due to its capacity for utilizing much larger turbines and thus higher power generation compared to onshore. With the increasing size of offshore wind turbine rotors, the design criteria used for the blades may also evolve. Increased flexibility in blades causes them to be more susceptible to experiencing flow-induced instability. One of the destructive aero-elastic instabilities that can occur in flexible structures subjected to aerodynamic loading is coupled-mode flutter. Coupled-mode flutter instability has not been a design driver in the current wind turbine blades, however, considering the industry tendency in utilizing longer and …

Lattice Boltzmann Methods For Wind Energy Analysis, Stephen Lloyd Wood

Doctoral Dissertations

An estimate of the United States wind potential conducted in 2011 found that the energy available at an altitude of 80 meters is approximately triple the wind energy available 50 meters above ground. In 2012, 43% of all new electricity generation installed in the U.S. (13.1 GW) came from wind power. The majority of this power, 79%, comes from large utility scale turbines that are being manufactured at unprecedented sizes. Existing wind plants operate with a capacity factor of only approximately 30%. Measurements have shown that the turbulent wake of a turbine persists for many rotor diameters, inducing increased vibration …