The ICC at the University of Strathclyde
ContactIndustrial Control Centre (ICC), University of Strathclyde (UoS)Prof. W. E. Leithead Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering University of Strathclyde 50 George Street, Glasgow G1 1QE, UK phone: +44 141 5482378 fax: +44 141 5484203 e-mail: w.leithead@eee.strath.ac.uk web: www.icc.strath.ac.uk |
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The ICC at the University of Strathclyde was established two decades ago and is an internationally known centre of excellence for control theory and application research. The ICC strives to maintain a 50:50 balance of innovative research together with a portfolio of real industrial application projects. It works across many industrial sectors including: Metals and Manufacturing, Automotive and Marine, Energy, Environment and Power, Chemical and Petrochemical, Aerospace and Defence. During the last two decades, the ICC has established strong links with many national and international companies and universities resulting in successful control system design and industrial implementation projects. The ICC is an autonomous research group within the Institute of Energy and the Environment (InstEE) at the University of Strathclyde, The InstEE is widely recognised for its internationally leading research and is the largest academic group in the UK concerned with electrical power systems and electric power generation. Wind energy is a major activity at the ICC, which is well known for its work on wind turbine control, and the InstEE.
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Research groups involved
The wind energy team in the ICC consists of 2 academic staff and 4 researchers. Its interests include the dynamic analysis, modelling and simulation of wind turbines together with ther control system design. Over 20 years controllers have been designed and implemented on a wide variety of commercial wind turbines including both constant speed and variable speed machines ranging in size from 300kw to 5MW. A focus of current research is active regulation of wind turbine structural loads on large multi-MW offshore wind turbines. In addition, the implication of advanced control systems on the design of wind turbines is also being investigated. ICC staff has wide experience of using industry standard simulation packaged such as BLADED and FLEX. Other collaborating teams within the InstEE are those in Renewable Energy, Plant Monitoring, Energy Conversion and Power Systems. Both the Renewable Energy and Plant-Monitoring teams’ actively research condition monitoring for offshore wind turbines including the application of intelligent system techniques to implement fault diagnosis, prognosis and machine learning within these systems. Wind energy research activity of these 4 teams also includes active load management, offshore resource assessment, advanced power electronic converters for improved reliability and stabilisation of local connection, power systems technical architectures and protection techniques for wind farms. The ICC chairs the EPSRC Wind Energy Research Consortium.
Facilities & Advanced Research Tools
| Software | Advanced wind turbine control system analysis and design toolset |
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| Software | Access to industry standard simulation packages such as BLADED and FLEX |
| Machine monitoring | A commercial wind turbine has been fully instrumented and a monitoring programme is underway |
R&D Strategy
| TERM | |||
| short | medium | long | |
| Integration of on-line identification of aerodynamics and integration into wind turbine controllers |  | | |
| Improved active load regulation of offshore multi-MW wind turbines and the its impact on machine design | | | |
| Integrated design platforms for wind turbine control system analysis and design | | |
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| Stability and dynamic issues related to integration of very large amounts of wind generation | | | |
| Improved matching of supply and demand through active load management | | | |
Education and training activities
The ICC is committed to undergraduate and postgraduate teaching in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering and strongly engages in technology transfer to industry through various training schemes. Its cosmopolitan environment attracts research engineers and students from around the world. The ICC closely collaborates with well known international control engineering Centres around the world and encourages academic exchange and visiting scholarships for closer collaboration. Every two years, at least one international conference and several workshops are hosted, where both the academic researchers and industrial engineers can exchange and discuss their work and research results.
