Prof. Dennice Gayme, JHU teaches lecture at UMass Amherst

Prof. Dennice Gayme of Johns Hopkins University spent the day at UMass Amherst on November 13, meeting with faculty and students before giving a guest lecture in the MIE Wind Energy Systems class. Her talk, titled Wind farms: wake interactions and their effect on power output, explored how turbine wakes form, evolve, and shape the performance of entire wind farms.

Prof. Gayme opened by grounding students in the physics of wakes, explaining how a turbine extracts energy from moving air and creates a region of reduced wind speed behind it. She then highlighted the surprising part of the story. While turbines slow the wind, turbulence gradually mixes that slower air with surrounding faster air, which allows the wake to recover energy as it travels downstream.

Students were particularly interested in her discussion of the classical wake models developed by Jensen and Katič and how those foundational ideas continue to guide modern research and layout decisions.