Electric energy production, distribution, and storage

Projects in electricity production and distribution aim at improving the availability of renewable energy sources, at accounting for the variability of renewable energy production in network security assessment and at ensuring ancillary services. The focus is on wind turbine and wind farm monitoring and control. Another objective is to improve the performance of battery storage by designing advanced battery management systems for Lithium-ion batteries on the basis of electrochemical models. Improvements aim at covering a wider operating range of the battery (faster charge/discharge operation thanks to proper handling of technological constraints) and ensuring higher reliability trough monitoring of the state of health and battery pack reconfiguration.

Mechatronics (UAVs and robotics)

The goal is to develop control units for Unmanned Aerial Systems to enable the UAVs (quadrotors, multirotors, blimps, etc.) to interact with the environment and to perform operations.

The main research projects ongoing are:

  • Control of Tethered Quadrotors
  • Control of Teams of UAVs and Ground Vehicles manipulating objects


MA1 Projects, Master Thesis, and possible subjects for doctoral applications are available on the subject: control of UAVs subject to constraints, control of UAV interacting with walls, control and navigation of blimp with visual information.

The research in robotics is notably studying force feedback in teleoperation with a view to surgical applications. Indeed, in minimally invasive surgery, the surgeon loses the sense of touch. Yet, this is fundamental for a certain number of operations like needle insertion in a specific layer of a tissue or palpation of an organ. We aim at developing specific master slave devices with force feedbacks for such tasks and, more generally, to study control algorithms in bilateral teleoperation.

Industrial processes

Providing tools for predictive maintenance and performance monitoring is the main objective of the projects in this application area. The considered issues include fouling monitoring in heat exchangers and gas turbines, leak detection in lubrication circuits, sensor and actuator monitoring in an activated sludge process and weld quality estimation in continuous strip lines. Monitoring and optimization of production processes involving a separation step through Simulated Moving Bed (SMB) chromatography is an on-going research direction.


 
Updated on May 19, 2022