MODELING, PATH PLANNING, AND CONTROL CO-DESIGN OF MARINE CURRENT TURBINES

Marine and hydrokinetic (MHK) energy systems, including marine current turbines and wave energy converters, could contribute significantly to reducing reliance on fossil fuels and improving energy security while accelerating progress in the blue economy. However, technologies to capture them are nascent in development due to several technical and economic challenges. For example, for capturing ocean flows, the fluid velocity is low but density is high, resulting in early boundary layer separation and high torque. This dissertation addresses critical challenges in modeling, optimization, and control co-design of MHK energy systems, with specific case studies of a variable buoyancy-controlled marine current turbine (MCT). Specifically, this dissertation presents (a) comprehensive dynamic modeling of the MCT, where data recorded by an acoustic Doppler current profiler will be used as the real ocean environment; (b) vertical path planning of the MCT, where the problem is formulated as a novel spatial-temporal optimization problem to maximize the total harvested power of the system in an uncertain oceanic environment; (c) control co-design of the MCT, where the physical device geometry and turbine path control are optimized simultaneously. In a nutshell, the contributions are summarized as follows: