Wind Turbine Design Research @ UT-Dallas: New Offshore Designs, New Technologies, and Digital Twins

Wind energy installations have shown strong growth in recent decades, especially on land while offshore deployments have been gaining momentum as well. Wind turbines are the largest rotating structures in the world (e.g., the GE Haliade X wind turbine produces 14MW with 107-meter blades). And, the state of Texas is a leading wind energy producer in the US in terms of installed power capacity. Despite the progress, new research is needed to develop the next generation of large-scale, reliable wind energy systems, especially in new environments such as offshore siting.

The aims of this presentation are two-fold: (1) to provide an overview of research at UT-Dallas research in wind energy systems, and (2) to explore potential collaborations with Math Department faculty and students.  For the first aim, the presentation will highlight research at UT-Dallas to develop new technologies for future wind energy systems including new turbine configurations and new technology solutions including active load control with plasma actuators, rotor segmentation, and digital twins. For the second aim, the presentation will highlight current and past work in the areas of (1) wind turbine digital twins and sensitivity analysis, (2) principal components analysis (or proper orthogonal decomposition) for use in model reduction and feature extraction, and (3) automatic differentiation for multibody dynamics and optimization.

Bio

Dr. D. Todd Griffith is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he also serves as Deputy Director of the UTD Center for Wind Energy.  His research contributions are in the areas of wind turbine design and structural dynamics; with a focus on developing new technologies to enable cost-effective, reliable, and large-scale wind energy systems including new wind turbine rotor designs for land-based and offshore siting, floating vertical axis wind turbines, and digital twin technologies for wind energy. Prior to joining UT-Dallas, Todd was a staff member at  Sandia National Laboratories in the Wind Energy, Water Power, and Structural Dynamics departments.