Integrated Control of Marine Electrical Power Systems

This doctoral thesis presents new ideas and research results on control of marine electric power system. The main motivation for this work is the development of a control system, power management system (PMS) capable to improve the system robustness to blackout, handle major power system faults, minimize the operational cost and keep the power system machinery components under minimal stress in all operational conditions. Today, the electric marine power system tends to have more system functionality implemented in integrated automation systems. The present state of the art type of tools and methods for analyzing marine power systems do only to a limited extent utilize the increased knowledge available within each of the mechanical and electrical engineering disciplines. As the propulsion system is typically consisted of the largest consumers on the vessel, important interactions exists between the PMS and vessel propulsion system. These are interacted through the dynamic positioning (DP) controller, thrust allocation algorithm, local thruster controllers, generators' local frequency and voltage controllers. The PMS interacts with the propulsion system through the following main functions: available power static load control, load rate limiting control and blackout prevention control (i.e. fast load reduction). These functions serve to prevent the blackout and to ensure that the vessel will always have enough power. The PMS interacts with other control systems in order to prevent a blackout and to minimize operational costs. The possibilities to maximize the performance of the vessel, increase the robustness to faults and decrease a component wear-out rate are mainly addressed locally for the individual control systems. The solutions are mainly implicative (for e.g. local thruster control, or DP thrust allocation), and attention has not been given on the interaction between these systems, the power system and PMS. Some of the questions that may arise regarding the system interactions, are as follows: how the PMS functionality may affect a local thruster control, how the local thruster control may affect the power system performance, how some consumers may affect the power system performance in normal operations and thus affect other consumers, how the power system operation may affect the susceptibility to faults and blackout, how various operating and weather conditions may affect the power system performance and thus propulsion performance though the PMS power limiting control, how propulsion performance may affect the overall vessel performance, which kind of faults can be avoided if the control system is re-structured, how to minimize the operational costs and to deal with the conflicting goals. This PhD thesis aims to provide answers to such questions. The main contributions of this PhD thesis are: − A new observer-based fast load reduction system for the blackout prevention control has been proposed. When compared to the existing fast load reduction systems, the proposed controller gives much faster blackout detection rate, high reliability in the detection and faster and more precise load reduction (within 150 miliseconds). − New advanced energy management control strategies for reductions in the operational costs and improved fuel economy of the vessel. − Load limiting controllers for the reduction of thruster wear-out rate. These controllers are based on the probability of torque loss, real-time torque loss and the thruster shaft accelerations. The controllers provide means of redistributing thrust from load fluctuating thrusters to less load fluctuating ones, and may operate independently of the thrust allocation system. Another solution is also proposed where the load limiting controller based on thrust losses is an integrated part of DP thrust allocation algorithm. − A new concept of totally integrated thrust allocation system, local thruster control and power system. These systems are integrated through PMS functionality which is contained within each thruster PLC, thereby distributed among individual controllers, and independent of the communications and dedicated controllers. − Observer-based inertial controller and direct torque-loss controller (soft anti-spin controller) with particular attention to the control of machine wear-out rate. These controller contribute to general shaft speed control of electrical thrusters, generators and main propulsion prime movers. The proposed controllers, estimators and concepts are demonstrated through time-domain simulations performed in MATLAB/SIMULINK. The selected data are typical for the required applications and may differ slightly for the presented cases.PhD i marin teknikkPhD in Marine Technolog