Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg (OvGU), Institute for Electrical Energy Systems (IESY):

The institute deals with electrical drive machines and actuators with special requirements. For example, linear actuators, magnetic bearings or gearless generators for hydropower applications, methods for indirect position and speed detection of rotors by measuring electrical quantities.

 IESY's core competencies are in the field of construction and design of unconventional propulsion systems and their control technology. IESY has many years of experience in actuator design, microcontroller-based control, and data acquisition. In recent years, methods for the control and optimization of motion trajectories have been intensively developed and are applied in different fields.

Contribution to the consortium:

IESY contributes to the realization of the project with experimental investigations on fish surrogates and robots. The active probes developed by the chair are used to simultaneously determine and complement numerics and to avoid the current practice of injecting live fish into turbines and recapturing them at the exit to determine the risk of injury. By mimicking relevant fish behavior (rheotaxis), they are expected to provide more accurate data on the risk of injury to fish in turbine passages than passive probes.

IESY's contribution is thus divided into two aspects: first, systems and methods are developed, including hardware and software of actuators as well as of sensors, control algorithms, real-time methods for data processing, and algorithms for data fusion. Second, experiments will be designed and conducted, followed by data analysis and model building. The models are designed to replicate the correlation between sensor or simulation data with damage to fish. IESY works very closely with Taltech, whose sensors are used in the project. IGF is supporting IESY with its real-world experience and biological expertise in the impact experiments and optimization of the robotic fish.