Please join us on Wednesday, February 18, 2026 for the Pierce Seminar at 4 PM in Room 1-190 with Prof. Dennice Gayme (Johns Hopkins University). 

Abstract Title: Towards Collective Control Of Wind Turbine Arrays On Land And Sea

Abstract: 

Wind farms comprise a network of dynamical systems that are coupled through the turbulent atmospheric boundary layer (ABL).  Wind farm control that accounts for this coupling have been shown to enable more efficient farm level power tracking for participation in grid services. In this talk we extend this idea to floating offshore wind farms, where the six degree of freedom turbine and platform system leads to additional complexity in both the turbine and farm level control problems. We introduce a suite of turbine and farm level models arranged in a traditional inner-outer loop architecture that ensures turbine and farm level performance. Simulations of an 8-turbine wind farm with wind inflow conditions based on high-fidelity simulations of the atmospheric boundary layer demonstrate good tracking of PJM RegD type market signals.

Bio:

Dennice F. Gayme is a Professor in Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.  She earned her B. Eng. & Society from McMaster University in 1997 and an M.S. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1998, both in Mechanical Engineering. She received her Ph.D. in Control and Dynamical Systems in 2010 from the California Institute of Technology. Her research interests include modeling, analysis and control of spatially distributed and large-scale networked systems, such as wind farms, wall-bounded shear flows, vehicle networks and power systems.  She is a fellow of the American Physical Society (2024), and was a recipient of the JHU Catalyst Award in 2015, ONR Young Investigator and NSF CAREER awards in 2017, JHU Discovery Awards in 2019 & 2022, a Whiting School of Engineering Johns Hopkins Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award in 2020, and the Turbulence and Shear Flow Phenomena (TSFP12) Nobuhide Kasagi Award in 2022.