Penn State has been awarded $1.2 million from the U.S. Department of Energy for a project designed to gather data from offshore wind projects.
The project's goal is to develop a computational cyber wind facility (CWF) that will give wind energy researchers the capability to collect data that cannot readily be gathered from an offshore facility, which has limited data collection capabilities.
Using petascale computer systems and high-performance computing, the proposed CWF will generate four-dimensional data over the entire wind turbine domain in a controlled cyber environment.
The CWF includes wave impacts on offshore wind turbines and elastic deformations of the blade and tower. This data will impact the wind turbine design and wind energy design tools to prevent damage and increase reliability and efficiency, according to researchers.
The project is a collaborative effort among Penn State researchers James Brasseur, principal investigator and professor of mechanical engineering, bioengineering and mathematics; and co-investigators Eric Paterson, chief scientist at the Applied Research Laboratory and professor of mechanical engineering; Sven Schmitz, assistant professor of aerospace engineering; and Robert Campbell, research associate at the Applied Research Laboratory.
The DOE recently awarded a total of $43 million to 41 separate offshore wind projects.
