AGENT: Targeting high efficient energy harvesting via controlling multistability

AGENT seeks to explore a frontier research area in applied dynamics and control to improve the performance of energy harvesting through implementing a novel minimal energy control. Engineering systems experiencing vibrations and impacts exhibit a rich variety of different long-term behaviours coexisting for a given set of parameters, which is termed as multistability or coexisting attractors. The fellow proposes to use for the first time the system's basins of attraction for minimum energy control, aiming to improve the efficiency of energy harvesting. In the long term, this fellowship will be fundamental for the realisation of energy efficient control, which will provide safe, reliable, and efficient operations for future energy harvesting systems impacting on almost every industrial sector, e.g., energy, construction, and manufacturing. The unique research approach of this fellowship, a joint effort of numerical and experimental studies, will secure a leading global position for the EU in numerical analysis and the experimental study of piecewise-smooth dynamical systems. This fellowship will be hosted by Prof. Yang Liu from the University of Exeter (UNEXE) with the secondment supervisor, Prof. Przemyslaw Perlikowski from the Lodz University of Technology (LUT). The fellow will be hosted by the Centre for Systems, Dynamics and Control (CSDC), a world-leading, multidisciplinary research centre at UNEXE, focusing on modelling of complex systems, dynamical systems, control theory and their applications in engineering and physical sciences. The proposed research and training will have a significant impact on her future career at multiple levels, while the host will benefit from her expertise on stochastic dynamical systems. In addition, the fellow will also transfer knowledge and develop networking between the hosting and the secondment universities, which will foster a long-term research collaboration on the cutting-edge techniques of nonlinear dynamics and control.