Title: Physics-Informed Twinning for Wind Energy Infrastructure: Learning by Modeling
Affiliation: ETH Zürich, Dep. of Civil, Env. and Geomatic Eng. Stefano-Franscini-Platz 5, 8093 Zürich Switzerland
The recent surge in computing power, combined with an advent of sensing technologies has allowed for the treatment of modern engineered systems as cyber-physical entities. Monitoring forms a means for delivering data-informed representations for both existing critical infrastructure and assets, as well as emerging systems, such as those related to renewable energy; with wind energy infrastructure forming a primary such instance. While the concept of digital twinning has been aggressively promoted and rapidly maturing in recent years, this proves nontrivial to enforce on wind turbine structures, which form assemblies of multiple components and operate under adverse and time-varying loads. The delivery of a digital representation, which is in a position to continually and - to the degree feasible - automatically interact with its physical counterpart suffers from the often fragmented nature of the monitoring and modeling procedures. This talk will discuss a synergistic approach to monitoring and twinning, which treats sensing, modelling, and condition assessment as interlinked blocks, which smoothly interact through a hybrid modeling framework. In such a scheme, often referred to as a grey-box approach, the collected observations are complemented with first principles and interpreted under the prism of physics, while in parallel discovering a-priori lacking knowledge on the underlying governing mechanisms. We focus the demonstrated applications to the monitoring and twinning of wind energy infrastructure.
Short Bio: Eleni Chatzi is an Associate Professor and Chair of Structural Mechanics and Monitoring at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering of ETH Zurich. Her research interests include the fields of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM), structural dynamics, and intelligent data-driven assessment for engineered systems. She is the current Vice-President of the European Academy of Wind Energy (EAWE). She led the recently completed ERC Starting Grant WINDMIL on the topic of "Smart Monitoring, Inspection and Life-Cycle Assessment of Wind Turbines". Her work in the domain of self-aware infrastructure was recognized with the 2020 Walter L. Huber Research prize, awarded by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the EASD Junior Research Prize in the area of Computational Structural Dynamics.