PI: Justin Jaworski
Co-PI(s): Arindam Banerjee
University: Lehigh University
Offshore wind power is a growth sector in the energy portfolio of Pennsylvania and neighboring states with access to the Great Lakes whose efforts have been facilitated and supported by the Clean Air Council. Siting and design of wind turbines in the lakebed requires an integrated analysis tool to understand the individual and coupled effects of wind and wave loading, as well as structural and foundation dynamics. In support of this effort, this project will develop an aeroelastic numerical solver that couples a free vortex wake aerodynamic method to the structural dynamics of rotating wind turbine blades. This computational module will be parallelized to achieve the speed necessary to use it with a hybrid simulation framework at Lehigh University, where wave and foundation dynamics can be incorporated with the aerodynamics in real time. The proposed project will integrate vertically the research of faculty, a postdoctoral scholar, and graduate and undergraduate students, and will generate publishable research in support of the development of a hybrid simulation tool to aid the Pennsylvania wind energy industry.