Sergio Grammatico has been awarded an NWO ENW-M1 grant

Sergio Grammatico, Associate Professor at the Delft Centre for Systems and Control (DCSC) has been awarded an individual NWO ENW-M1 grant of € 365.000 for his research project on wind farm control and optimization. NWO ENW-M grants are intended for curiosity-driven scientific research.

With this NWO grant, Sergio will appoint a post-doctoral researcher. The use cases of highest interest are Dutch offshore wind farms. Sergio Grammatico: “If you let wind turbines work without coordination, they can have detrimental effects on each other due to generated aerodynamic turbulence, and thus the entire wind farm is not working well”.

The aim of Sergio’s project is to optimally coordinate wind turbines between themselves, despite the model inaccuracies and stochastic variability of the wind conditions. While some turbines might not work at their individual best operating point, the main idea is to maximize the overall efficiency of the wind farm thanks to advanced mathematical optimization tools.

Sergio highlights: “This project is particularly exciting also because many disciplines come together, not only mechanical engineering and aerodynamics, but especially automatic control and optimization. We should in fact treat the wind turbines as complex dynamical systems and with our intelligent algorithms, we can make them perform at their maximum potential.”

Related to several research projects in wind turbine control and wind farm optimization, the DCSC Lab hosts some small-scale wind turbines and a small-scale wind generator for real experiments. The facility is flexible enough to emulate diverse configurations of wind farm and wind conditions.

For more information, please visit Sergio Grammatico’s website.