Berkeley Fluids Seminar
University of California, Berkeley
Bring your lunch and enjoy learning about fluids!
Wednesday, November 2, 2016
Fanuc Room, Etcheverry Hall, 12:00-13:00
Dr. Mahdi Abkar (Mechanical Engineering, Stanford)
Abstract: Wind turbines extract kinetic energy from the ambient flow in the turbulent atmospheric boundary layer (ABL). A profound understanding of the mutual interactions between ABL and wind turbines will indeed shed light on the path to the optimized wind farms. Apart from parameters like wind turbine sittings relative to the incoming wind, the wind farm performance is entangled with ABL flow whose structures and dynamics change by the variation of land-surface fluxes, geostrophic forcing and topography. Wind farms have also been reported to change land-surface fluxes (e.g. momentum, heat, moisture, pollution, etc.) which in turn can impact the local weather and climate. All in all, this indicates a complex coupling between ABL
and wind farms. An accurate and detailed prediction of ABL flow passing through a wind farm can provide insight into the dynamics of wind-farm-atmosphere interactions. Numerical simulation is a powerful and cost efficient approach that can provide invaluable information a) to maximize wind energy production; b) to minimize the fatigue load and noise inside a wind farm; and c) to quantify the magnitude and the spatial extent of a wind farm impact.
The specific objectives of my research include: a) improving our understanding about the effect of thermally stratified ABL flows on the evolution of wind turbine wakes as well as the performance of wind turbines in wind farms, and b) proposing new models to parameterize the effect of wind farms in large-scale atmospheric models (e.g., weather models).
Bio: Mahdi Abkar is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Turbulence Research (CTR) at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, in 2014. His research interests lie on Computational fluid dynamics, Atmospheric sciences and turbulence, and Wind energy.
Acknowledgments
Prof. Graham Fleming (Vice Chancellor for Research, UC Berkeley)
Prof. Eliot Quataert on behalf of The Theoretical Astrophysics Center and the Astronomy Department (UC Berkeley)
Prof. Philip S. Marcus on behalf of the Mechanical Engineering Department (UC Berkeley)
Prof. Michael Manga (Earth and Planetary Science, UC Berkeley)
Prof. Evan Variano (Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Berkeley)