Kareem El Sayed
Oriol Colomés* ([email protected])
Shagun Agarwal
Eliz-Mari Lourens
Floating flexible structures have a great potential for a wide range of applications in offshore and coastal engineering. Some prominent applications are their deployment as floating breakwaters, as a support for floating photovoltaic energy or as wave energy harvesting devices. These structures offer several advantages, including lightweight construction, ease of deployment, re-usability, and minimal impact on critical coastal processes such as sediment transport and fish migration. In some of these applications, the ability to control the motion of such structures could be very beneficial. For example, one might be interested in reducing the motion of floating flexible platforms to guarantee the stability of a certain superstructure.
In this work we present a framework for controlling the motion of flexible floating structures that combines a Model Predictive Control (MPC) algorithm with a monolithic Finite Element (FE) model for wave-structure interaction problems. To accelerate the control input optimization within the MPC, we develop a reduced order model using Dynamic Mode Decomposition with Control (DMDc), trained on open-loop FE model data. In addition, we implement a Kalman filter to reconstruct the system response from simulated sparse and noisy measurement data. In this contribution we also demonstrate the behavior of the proposed approach for a floating flexible structure with an elastic hinge subjected to regular and irregular waves.
The case of floating solar: Coupled hydroelastic optoelectric performance
