Learn more about our wind research:
- California Wind Energy Collaborative
- UC Davis Environmental Aerodynamics Lab
- UC Davis Soil Interactions Lab’s offshore wind turbines project
Our faculty involved in wind research:
- Jean-Jacques Chattot, professor of mechanical and aeronautical engineering
- Jason DeJong, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering
Wind turbine efficiency
Here is a time-traveler’s look at the possible future of energy as influenced by UC Davis activities — a preview of everyday life as we might experience it five to 50 years from now.
Predicted timing: 2010
In this infancy of alternative energy, when we are just beginning to wean ourselves from fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas), a significant portion of our electricity comes from thin air. But in the 1980s, when the first California wind farms sprouted in the passes at Altamont, San Gorgonio and Tehachapi, it was not a sure bet that we would ever get here.
Early wind-turbine designs varied widely — and so did their effectiveness at harnessing the wind profitably.
When General Electric asked UC Davis mechanical and aeronautical engineering professor Jean-Jacques Chattot to look into its design problems, Chattot was surprised to find that there were very few computer programs that could accurately predict how much energy the machines would produce. Some codes underestimated by 50 percent; others overestimated by 200 percent.
A series of technological advances
Starting in 2006, Chattot and his Ph.D. student Sven Schmitz helped the industry make a series of technological advances that ensured the success of wind in our green-energy portfolio.
Their first achievement was writing an ingenious software program that combined one method of calculating airflow within 3 feet of the blade with another method that calculated the rotor wake beyond that distance.
This “parallelized coupled solver” very accurately predicted airflow around turbine blades at all speeds.
Sensors and micromotors
Soon turbine makers moved from heavy, relatively stiff, metallic blades to lighter, more flexible, composite structures. They installed sensors and micromotors on the blade surfaces to match the blades’ shapes to changing wind conditions.
Turbines got bigger, too, until at 300 feet across, the length of a football field, their blades bent several feet at the tips.
So Chattot wrote correspondingly complex programs that coupled the fluid dynamics of airflow with the mechanics of those enormous blades. In his first programs, turbine blades were rigid, like the pre-lubricated Tin Man. In the new codes, the blades are limber and alive, flapping and twisting and producing energy much more efficiently as they twirl in the California breeze.
— Sylvia Wright