CMA presents "The Answer is Blowing in the Wind: A New Approach to Wind Energy"
Modern wind farms consisting of horizontal-axis wind turbines (HAWTs) require significant land resources to separate each wind turbine from the adjacent turbine wakes. The resulting inefficiency of HAWT farms is currently compensated by using taller wind turbines to access greater wind resources at high altitudes, but this solution comes at the expense of higher engineering costs and greater visual, acoustic, radar, and environmental impacts. John Dabiri has investigated the use of counter-rotating vertical-axis wind turbines (VAWTs) to achieve higher power output per unit land area than existing HAWT farms. Whereas modern HAWT farms produce 2 to 3 watts of power per square meter of land area, field tests indicate that power densities an order of magnitude greater can potentially be achieved by arranging VAWTs in layouts that enable them to extract energy from adjacent wakes and from above the wind farm. Please join us as Dr. Dabiri discusses this alternative approach, which also has the potential to reduce the cost, size, and environmental impacts of wind farms.
In 2001, John Dabiri graduated from Princeton University with a B.S.E. in mechanical and aerospace engineering. Later that year, he came to Caltech as a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellow, Betty and Gordon Moore Fellow, and Y.C. Fung Fellow in bioengineering. He earned an M.S. in aeronautics in 2003, followed by a Ph.D. in bioengineering with a minor in aeronautics in 2005, after which he joined the Caltech faculty. In 2008, he was selected as an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator for research in bio-inspired propulsion, and Popular Science named him one of its "Brilliant 10" scientists. In 2009 and 2010, respectively, he was selected for a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and received a MacArthur Fellowship.
These events are free. All members of the Campus and JPL communities and retirees are welcome. Because of security requirements, Campus personnel and retirees without Laboratory badges must be processed through the JPL Visitor Center and escorted by a JPL employee or resident affiliate for access to Building 180.
For more information, e-mail [email protected]; or call Emily Abbott, (626) 395-6373.
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