RAISE: CET: Rare-Earth-Free Magnet and AI-Driven Control for Power Generation, transmission, and Grid Integration of Offshore Wind

This project is jointly funded by the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), and funds allocated to Clean Energy Technology Initiative investments. This Research Advanced by Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering (RAISE) award is made in response to Dear Colleague Letter 23-109, as part of the NSF-wide Clean Energy Technology initiative.

Offshore wind power has the potential to play a crucial role in the United States' transition to a clean energy future. Higher and more consistent offshore wind speeds provide a more constant supply of energy than many onshore wind farms, and offshore wind farms can be located closer to larger population centers, thereby increasing impact and availability of renewable energy generation.

However, operating offshore systems at scale introduce numerous challenges, ranging from battery design to novel control systems to integration with the onshore power grid. This project, composed of a multidisciplinary team with expertise in material science, electrical engineering, and computer science, undertakes an integrated approach to address four key challenges limiting the expansion of offshore wind farms and their connection to onshore grids.

These challenges include the development of rare earth-free magnets that remove supply chain limitations, the development of novel control systems that provide more stable turbine operations, regional-scale wind modeling and forecasting to assist with grid operations and planning, and the design of novel high voltage AC/DC hybrid networks that are needed for integrating offshore energy production (transmitted over direct current) with AC-based onshore power grids. The project also devotes significant effort to undergraduate and graduate student education through the integration of the proposed research into capstone and “flipped classroom” course work at the investigators’ universities.

Through participation in the Pre-University committee (chaired by the project’s principal investigator) of the IEEE Power & Energy Society, the project will undertake outreach to high-school and community college students to increase their knowledge of clean energy technologies and recruit them to join advanced training and research programs.

The main objectives of this project are to advance offshore wind technologies from the level of individual wind turbines to their integration to the system level of an offshore wind farm. The first goal is to develop magnets that do not rely on rare-earth materials. By doing so, the project seeks to reduce the U.S.'s reliance on foreign suppliers for rare-earth materials in offshore wind turbines.

The second goal is to design an AI-driven control system at the MW scale that can overcome the unstable operations of individual permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSG) wind turbines that have been reported in the literature and by the industry in offshore applications. The third goal aims to develop temporal and spatial models that can be used to manage highly distributed offshore wind turbines and wind farms over a large geographic area.

These models will improve offshore wind transmission planning and integration of the offshore grid with the onshore main grid. Lastly, the project aims to establish a new testing mechanism using a unique per-unit and time-angular domain transformation. This will enable experimental research and evaluation of high-voltage, high-power hybrid AC-DC networks of the integrated electric power system with offshore wind, based on low-voltage, low-power hybrid AC/DC equivalent systems.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.