Biography

Yolanda Vidal has a degree in Mathematics (1999) and a PhD in Applied Mathematics (2005) from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). Thanks to the academic level demonstrated during the undergraduate studies (second of her promotion), she obtained the FI scholarship for PhD studies from the Generalitat de Catalunya in 2000. She carried out her PhD studies in the research group LaCàN–Mathematical and Computational Modeling, a group consolidated in the Research Plan of Catalonia from 1999 to date. Her PhD focused on numerical methods, in particular in the Element-Free Galerkin method applied to dynamic problems with large deformations. She did two research stays of 3 and 6 months at the University of Wales (UWS, Swansea, UK). She completed her doctoral thesis in 2005. During her first postdoctoral years, she carried out a postdoctoral stay of 6 months (01/02/2006 - 31/07/2006) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, Boston, USA).

In 2009, she joined the consolidated research group Control, Data, and Artificial Intelligence - CoDAlab. This coincides with Dr. Vidal beginning a new line of research related to wind turbine control and monitoring, and in 2010 she publishes her first contribution in this area. This area of research will accompany her to the present. In 2013 she begins to supervise her first PhD student, Christian Tutivén, with PhD final dissertation title “Fault Tolerant Detection and Control in Wind Turbines.” One of the results of Dr. Tutiven PhD was an invention patent titled “Method and analog electronic circuit for fault detection in the pitch hydraulic system of a wind turbine” that is registered at Spanish level. Dr. Tutivén completed his PhD in 2018 and he is currently an associate professor in Escuela Politécnica del Litoral (ESPOL), Ecuador. Dr. Tutiven and Dr. Vidal have a prolific professional collaboration (e.g., 12 co-authored high-impact journal articles) and are currently co-supervisors of 3 PhD students in the areas of wind turbine condition monitoring, fault diagnosis, and structural health monitoring. It should also be noted that Dr. Vidal has been co-editor of the book: N. Luo, Y. Vidal, L. Acho (Eds.), Wind Turbine Control and Monitoring, Advances in Industrial Control Series, Springer. This book, since its publication on 2014, has had more than 40,000-chapter downloads, being among the top 25% most downloaded in its respective Collection in 2019.

Since 2014, Dr. Vidal has been principal investigator in four competitive projects (three of them coordinated with the technological center IKERLAN) funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. The 2014 project titled “Development and validation of failure detection and design of fault-tolerant control strategies with application in offshore wind energy plants”, the 2017 project titled “Development and validation of intelligent monitoring systems, pitch and structural damping control strategies for floating offshore wind turbines”, and the two 2021 projects titled "Artificial intelligence for wind turbine condition monitoring and structural health monitoring" and "Gemelos digitales para la monitorización de la condición de aerogeneradores". Since 2017, Dr. Vidal added to her research a focus in machine and deep learning approaches.

In 2020, the Smartive company contacts Dr. Vidal to be the UPC scientific coordinator in a collaboration contract through a CDTI project titled “Comparative study of deep learning technologies and solutions for wind turbine fault diagnostics”. This allows Dr. Vidal access to a large database of real wind turbine SCADA data from different wind parks around the globe, thus expanding the possibilities of her research to validate her methodologies in a high-level technology readiness level (TRL).

Dr. Vidal is an IEEE Senior member, and with respect to editorial activities she serves as an Editorial Board Member for international journals, such as Engineering Applications of AI (Elsevier), Wind Energy (Wiley), Wind Energy Science (Copernicus), Journal of Vibration and Control (SAGE), Mathematics, Sensors, Energies, Frontiers in Built Environment, and Frontiers in Energy Research. She has also served as guest editor of 7 special issues, as external expert evaluator of European Union’s Horizon, and as evaluator of Programa Estatal Proyectos de I+D+i Retos Investigación.

In 2024, she was awarded the inaugural Open Science Award by UPC, acknowledging her commitment to open-access research and her contributions to advancing scientific knowledge. In fact, Dr. Vidal contributions are collected in 70 high-impact journal articles, 23 competitive R+D+I projects, 18 book chapters, 10 books, 7 supervised PhD thesis (4 ongoing), 1 invention patent, 1 collaboration contract with a company, 12 awards, and more than 120 conference papers.

Please, for further and updated details visit: https://futur.upc.edu/YolandaVidalSegui