UCF researcher leads $3.3 million project to develop floating offshore wind turbine simulators
In Florida, the University of Central Florida (UCF) said that an engineering professor is leading a $3.3 million project funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to research floating offshore wind turbines.
“My goal is to model floating offshore wind turbines and use the model to explore design improvements while concurrently investigating new ideas for control and sensing, a concept that is termed Control Co-Design,” said Tuhin Das, the project’s principal investigator and a professor in UCF’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
UCF said that Das is working to build a software that simulates effects of external phenomena, such as waves crashing and changing winds, on the floating platform and the turbine system.
“In phase one, our job was to show the kind of benefits we can bring to the modeling and simulation sector,” Das said. “We showed that our results were at par with industry-accepted models and experimental data.”
Das’ software platform will become a product that can be hosted on a university web page and be licensed or commercialized, UCF said.
