Kurias Mulakumattathil George

PhD Programme: Nanoscience, Materials and Chemical Engineering
Research group: ECoMMFiT - Experiments, Computation and Modelization in Fluid Mechanics and Turbulence
Supervisors: Ildefonso Cuesta Romeo, Clara Salueña Pérez & Jordi Solé Ollé

Bio

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Project: Experimental and numerical study of the layout of wind turbines for offshore wind farms

Recently wind energy plays an increasingly important role in replacing fossil fuels as a sustainable solution with low environmental impact. A task to the success of a wind farm is choosing the correct layout. For the wind turbine farms have been observed that the incorrect distribution of wind turbines increases power losses and can cause structural damage to wind turbines. If the knowledge of the interactions of turbine wakes is well recognized, it will be useful to improve the benefit of wind farms by optimizing wind farm layouts and turbine designs to minimize wakes and turbulence caused by the upstream flow of wind turbines. In addition, layout optimization of offshore wind farms constitutes a challenging task due to the interactions between air, sea and turbine flows. Among different layout optimization studies that have been published in the literature, very few considered the experimental study with small-scale models of wind farms. This research project will study the three-dimensional (3-D) experimental and numerical models to describe the wake distribution in wind farms. Small-scale experiments will be carried out in an atmospheric boundary layer tunnel and an open jet wind tunnel to study the characteristics of the flow and validate the computational models. This will allow to improve both, the parameterization of the models and the knowledge of the scale specific interactions between wind mills and atmosphere-ocean boundary layer dynamics. Another important objective of this study is to carry out a 3D computational study of the flow in an offshore turbine farm that considers the interaction between the dynamic field of the sea, the air and that produced by the turbines. The comparative study of the experimental results in a wind tunnel with those provided by numerical simulations will provide the scientific community with a knowledge that is very limited nowadays.

Outreach activities

• European Researchers’ Night 2021: “Lava lamps”.