ARROW faculty Dr. Julie Lundquist presents “New Insights Into Atmosphere-Energy Interactions via Virtual Lidar and Multiscale Modeling” at Brookhaven National Labs
When wind passes through a turbine, it spins the blades, transferring energy from the atmosphere to the machine and eventually to powering our homes. As the wind moves past those spinning blades, the once smooth flow becomes a turbulent mix similar to the gusts trailing behind moving cars or the wake churned up by a speeding boat. This disturbed flow introduces significant complications for understanding how well additional turbines function and how much energy they can produce when they sit downstream of the first one. Professor Julie Lundquist, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Wind Energy at Johns Hopkins University, is working to better understand this complexity and recently presented her findings at the Brookhaven National Labs.
Professor Lundquist and her team have developed a virtual lidar tool that can be combined with simulations to understand how turbine wakes behave in complex landscapes and whether certain atmospheric conditions, like stable layers, can slow wind before it reaches a turbine. This new open-source tool, combined with advanced simulations, helps researchers understand what instruments can and cannot capture before launching major field experiments.