Brad Marston and Baylor Fox-Kemper will join faculty from the University of New Hampshire and Bates College in a new study, now funded by the US Department of Energy’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). This summer, the DOE announced $33 million in funding for clean energy research projects. Professor Marston and Professor Fox-Kemper’s collaboration aims to model the marine atmospheric boundary layer for the purpose of optimizing the development of floating off-shore wind power:
“The ultimate objective of the project is to develop an innovative and forward-looking basic research capability for the computer simulation of turbulent air flow in and around floating offshore wind farms embedded within the marine atmospheric boundary layer—the approximately 500-1000 meter deep region of the atmosphere that is in direct contact with and directly influenced by the ocean. This new capability, which will offer unmatched computational efficiency for wind-farm-design-level accuracy, will be used to investigate fundamental turbulent flow phenomena in offshore wind farms…The validated, multiscale predictive capability developed in this project can be leveraged to maximize power production, limit hardware damage, and reduce the cost per megawatt-hour of floating offshore wind energy technology… By working together on this project in an intense and coordinated fashion, the research team thus will position themselves to investigate other pressing challenges in renewable energy and environmental sustainability. Finally, the states of New Hampshire, Maine, and Rhode Island will enjoy long-term benefits from this project, which will promote development of a workforce equipped with the technical skills to fill the growing needs in the energy sector and the blue economy.”
Read the full public abstract here.