Chao Sun
Louisiana State University, LA·Engineering
Floating offshore wind turbines sit on platforms rather than fixed foundations, and the grant describes this technology as key to reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. These turbines are pushed by wind, waves, currents and the turbulent wakes of neighboring turbines.
- Fields
Engineering
Earth & Environmental Science
Computer Science
- Topics
floating offshore wind
offshore wind energy
wind farms
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Develop a multi-fidelity model based on large eddy simulation, a technique that computes large turbulent swirls in a flow, to simulate how floating offshore wind turbines respond to combined wind, wave, current and wake flows.
- Determine how operational and extreme conditions affect the dynamic stability and structural integrity of individual floating turbines and the system-level performance of floating wind farms.
- Parameterize floating offshore wind farms through multiscale modeling and use the results to identify optimized farm layouts for given wind and wave conditions.
- Model the short- and long-term impacts of floating offshore wind farms on local and regional climate and ocean environments.
- Accelerate high-fidelity turbine and farm simulations using exascale supercomputing so that large, multiscale studies become practical.
More about the research
It is poorly understood how they perform under normal and extreme conditions, either one at a time or in large farms. Large floating wind farms may also change local and regional climate and ocean conditions.
Why it matters
Offshore wind developers and operators could use the results to design floating wind farms that withstand extreme marine conditions. The aim is to lower costs across design, installation, operation, maintenance and decommissioning. Coastal community managers and government officials could also gain clearer information on how large floating wind farms may affect local and regional climate and ocean environments.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Sven Schmitz
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Engineering
Test whether rotor thrust and induced power coefficient, rather than total power coefficient, are sufficient conditions for reproducing vortex wake turbulence and stability when a rotor is scaled down for wind tunnel testing.
Shuhui Li
University of Alabama, AL·Engineering
Develop permanent magnets for offshore wind turbines that do not rely on rare-earth materials, which reduces supply chain limits.
Jane Bae
California Institute of Technology, CA·Engineering·Early-career
Analyze high-resolution flow data to determine how the directionality (anisotropy) of unresolved small-scale turbulent motion behaves in attached and separating flows near walls.
The school
Louisiana State University: 15 labs on PI Pages, $431M a year on research, 323 research doctorates a year.
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