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Full-Text Articles in Engineering
Simplex Solutions For Optimal Control Flight Paths In Urban Environments, Michael D. Zollars, Richard G. Cobb, David J. Grymin
Simplex Solutions For Optimal Control Flight Paths In Urban Environments, Michael D. Zollars, Richard G. Cobb, David J. Grymin
Faculty Publications
This paper identifies feasible fight paths for Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems in a highly constrained environment. Optimal control software has long been used for vehicle path planning and has proven most successful when an adequate initial guess is presented flight to an optimal control solver. Leveraging fast geometric planning techniques, a large search space is discretized into a set of simplexes where a Dubins path solution is generated and contained in a polygonal search corridor free of path constraints. Direct optimal control methods are then used to determine the optimal flight path through the newly defined search corridor. Two scenarios …
Improving The Floris Wind Plant Model For Compatibility With Gradient-Based Optimization, Jared Thomas, Pieter Gebraad, Andrew Ning
Improving The Floris Wind Plant Model For Compatibility With Gradient-Based Optimization, Jared Thomas, Pieter Gebraad, Andrew Ning
Faculty Publications
The FLOw Redirection and Induction in Steady-state (FLORIS) model, a parametric wind turbine wake model that predicts steady state wake characteristics based on wind turbine position and yaw angle, was developed for optimization of control settings and turbine locations. This paper provides details on the recent changes made to the FLORIS model to make the model more suitable for gradient-based optimization. Changes to the FLORIS model were made to remove discontinuities and add curvature to regions of non-physical zero gradient. Exact gradients for the FLORIS model were obtained using algorithmic differentiation. A set of three case studies demonstrate that using …
Optimization Under Uncertainty For Wake Steering Strategies, Julian Quick, Jennifer Annoni, Ryan King, Katherine Dykes, Paul Fleming, Andrew Ning
Optimization Under Uncertainty For Wake Steering Strategies, Julian Quick, Jennifer Annoni, Ryan King, Katherine Dykes, Paul Fleming, Andrew Ning
Faculty Publications
Wind turbines in a wind power plant experience significant power losses because of aerodynamic interactions between turbines. One control strategy to reduce these losses is known as 'wake steering,' in which upstream turbines are yawed to direct wakes away from downstream turbines. Previous wake steering research has assumed perfect information, however, there can be significant uncertainty in many aspects of the problem, including wind inflow and various turbine measurements. Uncertainty has significant implications for performance of wake steering strategies. Consequently, the authors formulate and solve an optimization under uncertainty (OUU) problem for finding optimal wake steering strategies in the presence …