Project Management

Kjell is a full professor in UiA – Mechatronics. Kjell has (co)authored over 130 publications in the field of mechanical engineering, vehicle crash diagnostics and CM. Kjell has long and successful leadership experience in managing large-scale research projects. In his capacity as head of research group at Agder research, Kristiansand, he was responsible for developing a test site at Lista Airport, Farsund for vehicle crash diagnostics, where around 140 tests were documented. Since 2015, Kjell heads condition monitoring group at UiA, that has published over 60 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers in the area of CM for rotating machinery making it probably the top research centre in Norway for CM. Since 2016, Kjell was a project leader on the Norwegian-Polish wind energy project (STOW) and from 2017, Kjell was a member of the centre management group of the NORCOWE program. Since 2019, Kjell is also the director of the Top Priority Research Centre in Mechatronics at UiA. Kjell is also instrumental in realizing and conducting research under the SFI Offshore Mechatronics, WP 5 on CM.

Surya T. Kandukuri – Assistant Project Manager

Surya is a Sr. Scientist with Smart Instrumentation and Industrial Testing group at NORCE Norwegian Research Centre . He is also a researcher (part-time) at UiA – Mechatronics. He has obtained his PhD degree at UiA in the area of CM and (co)authored more than 20 publications. He has over 13 years of experience in developing CM solutions for energy, aerospace and marine equipment in GE Global Research, Airbus Defence and Space, Machine Prognostics AS, and Cognite AS. Surya will be the assistant project manager for AIMWind project.

Van Khang Huynh – WP 1 Leader

Khang is a full professor in UiA – Mechatronics, with a research focus on design and control of electrical machinery, CM of rotating machinery and renewable energy systems. Khang has (co)authored about 70 papers in the above fields. Khang holds a PhD in electrical machine design from Aalto University, Finland. Khang is a PI and project manager on industry co-funded projects with RCN and Flekkefjord Elektro on control and CM of electrical winches and compact-efficient bidirectional converters, ENERGIX program on Integrated Renewable Resources and Storage: Operations and Management, and EMONDI – Industrial Internet methods for electrical energy conversion systems monitoring and diagnostics (EEA Grants, 2021-2023).

Rune Schlanbusch – WP 2 Leader

Rune works as deputy research director at NORCE Norwegian Research Center, Norway, within the group of Smart Instrumentation and Industrial Testing. Rune received his MSc within Space Technology at University of Tromsø (UiT), Norway and PhD within Engineering Cybernetics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway. His research interests include control design and stability analysis of unmanned systems, condition monitoring of machinery and structures and multi-physics FEM modeling and simulation conveyed through 60 research papers.

Christian Walter Peter Omlin – WP 3 Leader

Christian Omlin joined UiA in September 2018 as a Professor in UiA’s Center for Artifical Intelligence Research . He has previously taught at the University of South Africa, University of the Witwatersrand, Middle East Technical University, University of the South Pacific, University of the Western and Stellenbosch University. He did his PhD and Postdoc at NEC Research Institute in Princeton. Much of his research focuses on architectures, learning algorithms, hybrid systems and knowledge representation and explanation/interpretation in deep machine learning models for time series classification, prediction and anomaly detection with applications such as fault diagnostics in particle accelerators (CERN), security (e.g. network intrusion and fraud detection), safety (e.g. prediction of rock falls in mines), human/computer interaction (e.g. sign language interpretation), bioconservation (e.g. mangrove monitoring with drones), health (e.g. daytime/nighttime activity monitoring in hospitals) and astronomy (e.g. variable star classification).

Riccardo Ferrari – WP 4 Leader

Riccardo M.G. Ferrari is a Marie Curie Alumnus and Assistant Professor in Fault Tolerant Control at Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands), in the Delft Center for Sytems and Control. His present and future research interests include: Fault Diagnosis and Cyber-attack Detection, Nonlinear Distributed Systems, Wind Energy, Cooperative Autonomous Vehicles, Smart Buildings and HVAC, Numerical Modelling and industrial applications of advanced monitoring and control techniques. He received the “Laurea” degree (Cum Laude and printing honours) in Electronic Engineering in 2004 and the Ph.D. degree in Information Engineering in 2009, both from the University of Trieste. He is the recipient of the 2005 Giacomini Award of the Italian Acoustic Society, and has authored and co-authored over 52 papers published in international peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings. He covered a unique career path that led him to hold both academical and industrial R&D positions, in particular as researcher and executive manager in the field of process instrumentation and control for the steelmaking sector.
In 2005 he earned a B.A. in Classical Piano from the “G. Tartini” Conservatory of Music of Trieste (Italy).

Research Candidates

Nam Du Hoang Nguyen – PhD Research Fellow (WP 1)

Nam Du works as a PhD research fellow in UiA-Mechatronics with focus on condition monitoring for wind turbine components. Nam Du is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree with the Mechatronic department at the University of Agder, Norway. His focus is on turbine component health assessment and remaining useful life (RUL) for wind farm life extension. He received his bachelor’s in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Ho Chi Minh University of Technology in 2016, in Vietnam. He was a SCADA engineer at MPCO., LTD from 2016 to 2019, and had done several projects about SCADA/smart grid applications with Electricity of Vietnam (EVN). Finding the academic career enticing, he pursued his first master’s degree by research in the Department of Energy System Engineering, Inje University, South Korea, in 2021. During his research, he was attached to the Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO) for evaluating the Electric Power with High Renewable Penetration. His area of research was the application of an energy storage system corporate with a synchronous generator, and system inertia in a power system.

Christos S. Sakaris – Post-doctoral Research Fellow (WP 2)

Christos S. Sakaris works as a postdoctoral researcher in NORCE Norwegian Research Centre, Grimstad, Norway by participating in the part “Low-cost solutions for turbine structural health monitoring” of the project AIMWind. He is a Mechanical & Aeronautical Engineer and he received his PhD in vibration based Structural Health Monitoring from the University of Patras, Greece (2018). After his Phd studies, Christos worked as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Liverpool Logistics, Offshore and Marine (LOOM) Research Institute of the Liverpool John Moores University, UK (2019-2020). There, he achieved damage diagnosis (damage detection, damage identification, damage precise quantification) on the tendons of an offshore platform supporting a Floating Offshore Wind Turbine (FOWT) and on the FOWT’s tower under varying environmental conditions. Additionally, his knowledge includes processing of vibration signals in the time and frequency domain, monitoring the condition of various types of structures (truss, aircraft skeleton, vertical stabilizer, offshore wind turbine and others), structural / modal analysis via data-based models, diagnosis of a damage via statistical monitoring / machine learning methods and use of electronic equipment (sensors, exciters, data acquisition devices) for vibration testing.

Manuel S. Mathew – PhD Research Fellow (WP 3)

Manuel is a PhD Research Fellow at the University of Agder. Hailing from Kerala, India, he received his bachelor’s in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Mahatma Gandhi University in India. Finding the academic career enticing, he pursued his first master’s degree by research in systems engineering from the University of Brunei Darussalam (UBD). During his research, he was attached to the UBD|IBM Centre, which was an industry-academia collaboration between UBD and the International Business Machines (IBM). His area of research was the application of AI in power system management. He joined the University of Agder in 2019 as a master’s student in Renewable Energy and undertook his thesis on the applications of AI in renewable energy integrated systems. Currently, he is a research fellow in the collaborative project AIMWind (Analytics for asset Integrity Management of Windfarms) between the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR) and Mechatronics Group at UiA. His focus is on machine learning and analytics for windfarm life extension.

Alex J. Gallo – Post-doctoral Research Fellow (WP 4)

Alexander J. Gallo holds a PhD from Imperial College London, and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at TU Delft, Delft, Netherlands, as part of the AIMWind project. His main research interests are health-aware and fault tolerant control of wind turbines, as well as distributed cyber-security and fault tolerant control for large-scale interconnected systems, with a particular focus on energy distribution networks.

Advisors

Francesco Vanni – Advisory Member

Francesco Vanni is a Principal Engineer and Head of the Renewable Energy Analytics department at DNV GL – Energy Systems. He leads a group of 40 engineers across Europe and the US in analysing data from meteorological masts, wind turbines, solar panels, the grid, in order to find useful insights that can help our customers – and the energy industry at large – reduce the cost of renewables and facilitate the transition to a greener future.
His responsibilities include a mix of line management, strategy, financial control and leadership of commercial and R&D work. Francesco has experience in both the manufacturing and operational sides of wind industry. He has a background is in aerospace engineering and control systems and prior to his current job at DNV, he worked in academia and in the defence sector.

Rune Reinertsen – Advisory Member

Rune Reinertsen has a masters in technical cybernetics from NTNU in Trondheim. He is the Sales Director at Origo Solutions. Origo Solutions delivers SCADA systems for the wind industry. They have made deliveries for Hywind Scotland and Zefyros and are currently developing the common SCADA system for Dogger Bank A, B and C.

Rune has held various positions within automation, fire protection and fire detection. In particular, as Managing Director of Inmaco and Director at Semco Maritime.