Abstract
With the Department of Energy's recent goal of deploying 30GW of offshore capacity by 2030, the offshore wind sector has already seen and will continue seeing unprecedented growth of offshore wind over the coming decade. Despite having stronger and reliable winds offshore, the dynamics of wind farms are immensely complicated due to the additional degrees of freedom, e.g., unconventional wind events like low-level jets, hurricanes, coupling of wind with wave turbulence and floating support structures in turbines. In the present talk, I will give a brief overview of unconventional wind events, in particular a phenomenon known as coastal low-level jets and how it influences the loads and power production of wind farms. These wind events are not frequent in a year and hence are not critical for annual energy production (AEP). However, strong winds and high turbulence in these wind events can create damaging vibrational loads in the turbine systems. The simulated effects of low-level jets on wind farms have been captured using close-to-reality weather pattern driven high-fidelity exascale computation models which allowed us a unique opportunity to look at the multi-scale physics involved in atmosphere-turbine interaction. The presentation will highlight the implications of these wind events in farms using analysis from the numerical simulations and also explore the load mitigation strategies that GE is interested in to prevent turbine accidents in future.
About the Speaker
Dr. Tanmoy Chatterjee is a Lead Research Engineer in Aerodynamics and ThermoSciences Division at GE Vernova Advanced Research Center, United States. Dr. Chatterjee received his PhD from Arizona State University where he worked on developing high-fidelity numerical modeling techniques with applications in atmospheric boundary layers and wind farms. After that, he joined the Energy Systems division at Argonne National Laboratory as a Post-doctoral Associate where he worked on high performance computing and high fidelity numerical modeling of moving geometries with applications in internal combustion engines. At GE Research, he contributes and manages diverse portfolio of research programs in the area of aerodynamics, high-performance computing, fluid-structure interaction and controller design that led to more efficient and reliable wind & gas turbine products. Dr. Chatterjee has been the PI of several DOE & GE Business funding for several projects in the field of wind energy. His research interests include aeroelasticity, high-performance computing in CFD, atmospheric boundary layers and reduced order modelling. Outside of work, Dr. Chatterjee loves spending time with his kids, reading about mathematics and participating in various stem outreach activities in local schools.
Host: Professor Leonardo Chamorro
