Peilin Xie, AAU Energy, will defend the thesis "Power Management System Design for Shipboard Microgrid".

Title

Power Management System Design for Shipboard Microgrid

PhD defendant

Peilin Xie

Supervisor

Professor Josep M. Guerrero

Co-supervisor

Professor Juan C. Vasquez

Opponents

Associate Professor Zhenyu Yang (Chairman)
Mattia Ricco, University of Bologna, Italy
Yu Wang, Shenzhen University, China

Abstract

Currently, traditional fossil fuels are still the primary power resource for maritime transportation, accounting for more than 95% of the fuel consumed by international shipping. With the increasing demand for decarbonization in the shipping industry, efforts shall be made to achieve more fuel-efficient operation. Thanks to the development of power electronics and information technologies, the future ship is trending towards an all-electric ship with electrical propulsion systems, which offers greater flexibility and operational efficiency, yet makes the vessel more vulnerable to variable and fluctuating propulsion loads, leading to unreliable or inefficient operation.
Hybrid energy storage system has proven to be effective in addressing this issue. However, guaranteeing that the hybrid types of energy components can effectively support the high-frequency fluctuations, assist the main gensets, and ensures sufficient energy backup throughout variable sea states and cruising conditions is critical and places additional requirements for power management systems.
Therefore, the objective of the thesis is to ensure the reliable, efficient, and resilient operation of the ship by developing real-time power management systems. To this end, this project starts with an extensive review of existing optimization-based power/energy management system (PMS/EMS) that have been applied to shipboard microgrids. Based on that, the current research status, gaps, and future trends are summarized and discussed. Next, real-time power management systems that are in the centralized arrangement are developed for radially distributed ships. The proposed PMS is optimization-based and determines the optimal power splitting among multiple energy sources by minimizing the instantaneous equivalent fuel consumption of each component. In addition, a load forecasting system is developed that effectively avoids the power tracking delays and enhances the fuel-saving capability by providing real-time and multi-step load forecasting information. Furthermore, considering the future trend of ships toward larger scales and zonal distributions, a real-time distributed power management system is developed for the zonal multi-microgrid ship. The distributed scheme can significantly reduce computation time and greatly improve system resilience to failure conditions, while maintaining fuel-efficient operation and healthy energy backup throughout the voyage. Finally, the overall summaries and conclusions of the thesis are made and presented.
To illustrate the efficiency of the proposed strategies, a series of simulations were performed on MATLAB/Simulink, including comparisons with conventional methods, tests under different sea states and cruising conditions, examination under normal and fault conditions, sensitivity analysis, etc. Results prove that the proposed strategy can realize (i) good power tracking performance under highly fluctuating loads, (ii) high fuel-efficiency operation, (iii) sufficient energy backup throughout the voyage, and (iV) enhanced resilience for zonal electrical distribution (ZED)-based ships. The proposed power management strategies are simple in structure and fast in computation, and therefore suitable for further applications.

The defence will be in english - all are welcome.

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