Multi- Versus Single-Level Dynamic Synthesis/Design and Operation/Control Optimizations of a PEMFC System

Author(s):  
Meng Wang ◽  
Kihyung Kim ◽  
Michael R. von Spakovsky ◽  
Douglas J. Nelson

As primary tools for the development of energy systems, optimization techniques have been studied for decades. However, for large-scale synthesis/design and operation/control optimization problems, it may turn out that it is impractical to solve the entire problem as a single optimization problem. In this paper, a multi-level optimization strategy, dynamic iterative local-global optimization (DILGO), is utilized for the synthesis/design and operation/control optimization of a 5 kWe PEMFC (Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell) system. The strategy decomposes the system into three subsystems: a stack subsystem (SS), a fuel processing subsystem (FPS), and a work and air recovery subsystem (WRAS) and, thus, into three optimization sub-problems. To validate the decomposition strategy, the results are compared with a single-level dynamic optimization, in which the whole system is optimized together. In addition, for the purpose of comparison between different optimization algorithms, gradient-based optimization results are compared with those for a hybrid heuristic/gradient-based optimization algorithm.

Author(s):  
Kihyung Kim ◽  
Meng Wang ◽  
Michael R. von Spakovsky ◽  
Douglas J. Nelson

Proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) are one of the leading candidates in alternative energy conversion devices for transportation, stationary, and portable power generation applications. Such systems with their own fuel conversion unit typically consist of several subsystems: a fuel processing subsystem, a fuel cell stack subsystem, a work recovery-air supply subsystem, and a power electronics subsystem. Since these subsystems have different physical characteristics, their integration into a single system/subsystem level unit make the problems of optimal dynamic system synthesis/design and operation/control highly complex. Thus, dynamic system/subsystem/component modeling and highly effective optimization strategies are required. Furthermore, uncertainties in the results of system synthesis/design and operation/control optimization can be affected by any number of sources of uncertainty such as the load profiles and cost models. These uncertainties can be taken into account by treating the problem probabilistically. The difficulty with doing this, particularly when large-scale dynamic optimization with a large number of degrees of freedom is being used to determine the optimal synthesis/design and operation/control of the system, is that the traditional probabilistic approaches (e.g., Monte Carlo Method) are so computationally intensive that combined with large-scale optimization it renders the problem computationally intractable. This difficulty can be overcome by the use of approximate approaches such as the response sensitivity analysis (RSA) method based on Taylor series expansion. Thus, in this paper, a stochastic modeling and uncertainty analysis methodology for energy system synthesis/design and operation/control which uses the RSA method is proposed and employed for calculating the uncertainties on the system outputs. Their effects on the synthesis/design and operation/control optimization of a 5kWe PEMFC system are assessed by taking the uncertainties into account in the objectives and constraints. It is shown that these uncertainties significantly affect the reliability of being able to meet certain constraints (e.g., that on the CO concentration) during the synthesis/design and operation/control optimization process. These and other results are presented.


Author(s):  
Meng Wang ◽  
Kihyung Kim ◽  
Michael R. von Spakovsky ◽  
Douglas J. Nelson

An often used approach to the synthesis/design optimization of energy systems is to only use steady state operation and high efficiency (or low total life cycle cost) at full load as the basis for the synthesis/design. Transient and partial load operations are considered secondarily by system and control engineers once the synthesis/design is fixed (i.e. system testing with standard load profiles). This paper considers the system dynamics from the very beginning of the synthesis/design process by developing the system using a set of transient thermodynamic, kinetic, geometric as well as cost models developed and implemented for the components of a 5 kW PEMFC (Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell) system. The system is composed of three subsystems: a stack subsystem (SS), a fuel processing subsystem (FPS), and a work and air recovery subsystem (WRAS). In addition, state space is used in a looped set of optimizations to illustrate the effect of the control system on the synthesis/design optimization and to develop a set of optimal multi-input, multi-output (MIMO) controllers consistent with the optimal synthesis/design of the PEMFC system. It is shown that these MIMO controllers correspond to the ones found in a non-looped optimization in which the gains for the controllers are part of the decision variable set for the overall synthesis/design and operation/control optimization. These last set of results are then compared with the optimizations results found with the traditional approach of using a single load point in order to show the advantage of the dynamic optimization.


Author(s):  
Lu Chen ◽  
Handing Wang ◽  
Wenping Ma

AbstractReal-world optimization applications in complex systems always contain multiple factors to be optimized, which can be formulated as multi-objective optimization problems. These problems have been solved by many evolutionary algorithms like MOEA/D, NSGA-III, and KnEA. However, when the numbers of decision variables and objectives increase, the computation costs of those mentioned algorithms will be unaffordable. To reduce such high computation cost on large-scale many-objective optimization problems, we proposed a two-stage framework. The first stage of the proposed algorithm combines with a multi-tasking optimization strategy and a bi-directional search strategy, where the original problem is reformulated as a multi-tasking optimization problem in the decision space to enhance the convergence. To improve the diversity, in the second stage, the proposed algorithm applies multi-tasking optimization to a number of sub-problems based on reference points in the objective space. In this paper, to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, we test the algorithm on the DTLZ and LSMOP problems and compare it with existing algorithms, and it outperforms other compared algorithms in most cases and shows disadvantage on both convergence and diversity.


Author(s):  
Kihyung Kim ◽  
Meng Wang ◽  
Michael R. von Spakovsky ◽  
Douglas J. Nelson

A stochastic modeling and uncertainty analysis methodology for energy system synthesis/design is proposed in this paper and applied to the development of the fuel processing subsystem (FPS) of a proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) system. The FPS consists of a steam methane reformer, both high and low temperature water-gas shift reactors, a CO preferential oxidation reactor, a steam generator, a combustor, and several heat exchangers. For each component of the system, detailed thermodynamic, geometric, chemical kinetic, and cost models are developed and integrated into an overall model for the subsystem. Conventionally, in energy system synthesis/design, such models are treated deterministically, using a specific set of non-probabilistic input variable values that produce a specific set of non-probabilistic output variable values. Even though these input values, which include the specific load profile (i.e. electrical, thermal, and/or aerodynamic) for which the system or subsystem is synthesized/designed, can have significant uncertainties that inevitably propagate through the system to the outputs, such deterministic approaches are unable to quantify these uncertainties and their effect on the final synthesis/design and operation/control. This deficiency can, of course, be overcome by treating the inputs and outputs probabilistically. The difficulty with doing this, particularly when large-scale dynamic optimization with a large number of degrees of freedom is being used to determine the optimal synthesis/design and operation/control of the system, is that the traditional probabilistic approaches (e.g., Monte Carlo Method) are so computationally intensive that combined with large-scale optimization it renders the problem computationally intractable. This difficulty can be overcome by the use of approximate approaches such as the response sensitivity analysis (RSA) method based on Taylor series expansion. In this study, RSA is employed and developed by the authors for use with dynamic energy system optimization. Load profile and cost models are treated as probabilistic input values and uncertainties in output results investigated. The results for the uncertainty analysis applied to the optimization of the FPS synthesis/design and operation/control are compared with those found using a Monte Carlo approach with good results. In this paper, the FPS synthesis/design and operation optimization is treated as a multi-objective optimization problem to minimize the capital cost and operating cost simultaneously, and uncertainty effects on the optimization are assessed by taking uncertainties into account in the objectives and constraints. Optimization results show that there is little effect on the objective (the operating cost and capital cost), while the constraints (e.g., that on the CO concentration) can be significantly affected during the synthesis/design and operation/control optimization.


Author(s):  
Hosam K. Fathy ◽  
Panos Y. Papalambros ◽  
A. Galip Ulsoy

The plant and control optimization problems are coupled in the sense that solving them sequentially does not guarantee system optimality. This paper extends previous studies of this coupling by relaxing their assumption of full state measurement availability. An original derivation of first-order necessary conditions for plant, observer, controller, and combined optimality furnishes coupling terms quantifying the underlying trilateral coupling. Special scenarios where the problems decouple are pinpointed, and a nested optimization strategy that guarantees system optimization strategy that guarantees system optimality is adopted otherwise. Applying these results to combined passive/active car suspension optimization produces a suspension design outperforming its passive, active, and sequentially optimized passive/active counterparts.


Algorithms ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 108
Author(s):  
Alexey Vakhnin ◽  
Evgenii Sopov

Many modern real-valued optimization tasks use “black-box” (BB) models for evaluating objective functions and they are high-dimensional and constrained. Using common classifications, we can identify them as constrained large-scale global optimization (cLSGO) tasks. Today, the IEEE Congress of Evolutionary Computation provides a special session and several benchmarks for LSGO. At the same time, cLSGO problems are not well studied yet. The majority of modern optimization techniques demonstrate insufficient performance when confronted with cLSGO tasks. The effectiveness of evolution algorithms (EAs) in solving constrained low-dimensional optimization problems has been proven in many scientific papers and studies. Moreover, the cooperative coevolution (CC) framework has been successfully applied for EA used to solve LSGO problems. In this paper, a new approach for solving cLSGO has been proposed. This approach is based on CC and a method that increases the size of groups of variables at the decomposition stage (iCC) when solving cLSGO tasks. A new algorithm has been proposed, which combined the success-history based parameter adaptation for differential evolution (SHADE) optimizer, iCC, and the ε-constrained method (namely ε-iCC-SHADE). We investigated the performance of the ε-iCC-SHADE and compared it with the previously proposed ε-CC-SHADE algorithm on scalable problems from the IEEE CEC 2017 Competition on constrained real-parameter optimization.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-60
Author(s):  
Kuntal Bhattacharjee

The purpose of this article is to present a backtracking search optimization technique (BSA) to determine the feasible optimum solution of the economic load dispatch (ELD) problems involving different realistic equality and inequality constraints, such as power balance, ramp rate limits, and prohibited operating zone constraints. Effects of valve-point loading, multi-fuel option of large-scale thermal plants, system transmission loss are also taken into consideration for more realistic application. Two effective operations, mutation and crossover, help BSA algorithms to find the global solution for different optimization problems. BSA has the capability to deal with multimodal problems due to its powerful exploration and exploitation capability. BSA is free from sensitive parameter control operations. Simulation results set up the proposed approach in a better stage compared to several other existing optimization techniques in terms quality of solution and computational efficiency. Results also reveal the robustness of the proposed methodology.


Author(s):  
Marwan Hafez ◽  
Khaled Ksaibati ◽  
Rebecca A. Atadero

Over the last decade, significant progress has been made to customize the maintenance policies of low-volume roads (LVRs) to local needs and available resources. Low-cost treatments and surface repairs are extensively employed to reduce annual maintenance costs. Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) uses chip seals and thin overlays as the available treatment options applied to LVRs. However, the effectiveness of these treatments differs depending on the existing condition of pavements. Some surface treatments and light rehabilitations provide only short-term effectiveness. Multi-year optimization techniques can support decision makers with a set of optimal maintenance activities to achieve specific pavement performance targets. This study applies large-scale optimization to compare the current CDOT maintenance policy with an alternative strategy recommended for low-volume paved roads in Colorado. Genetic algorithms were applied in the optimization models because they are capable of resolving the computational complexity of optimization problems in a timely fashion. The optimized maintenance alternatives were comprehensively investigated for a LVR network in Colorado over a specific planning horizon. The specific optimization constraints and limitations prevailing in LVRs are addressed and introduced in the problem formulation of the optimization process. The results of both performance and cost analysis emphasize the effectiveness of the proposed maintenance strategy compared with the existing one. The alternative policy provides much more benefit-cost saving while preserving the overall pavement performance of the network. This approach is expected to be efficient to quantify the mid- and long-term financial impact of different treatment policies applied to LVRs within modest resources.


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