A PhD scholarship is available for an international or New Zealand student to work on a tidal current energy research project. The project focuses on determining how much power large arrays of turbines can produce in a range of situations.
To realize the Giga Watts of power available in many channels around the world tidal turbine farms must be big. The arrays of 1-10 turbines currently planned must grow to arrays with 100s of turbines to make a significant contribution to the demand for renewable energy. A hundred tidal turbines in a channel do not produce 100 times the power produced by the first turbine installed in the channel. The array may produce either, much less than 100 times one, or much more than 100 times one [2-4]. In some channels the turbines can even exceed the upper limit on turbine power production, the Betz limit [5]. This non-linear scaling of power production with the number of turbines in a farm results from the power extraction reducing flows throughout the narrow channels which have most of the promising farm sites [1]. Modelling channels with turbine farms is critical to determining how much power a large farm can produce because production is strongly linked to the physics of the channel as a whole, as well as how the turbines are arranged and tuned [2-6].
The project would involve modelling tidal turbine farms using a range of approaches, from simple analytic 1D models to large complex 2D coastal hydro-dynamical numerical models. The project would include modelling the effect of a large tidal range and channel shape on the power production by an array of turbines in both short and long channels, along with the determining optimal arrangements for the turbines within the farm.
The project would be part of a larger NZ Royal Society Marsden Grant funded project "A scaling law for a renewable energy resource: is gigawatt output from tidal turbine farms realistic?" . The Marsden Grant is in collaboration with Stanford University. The PhD student would work with staff and Post Doc from both Otago and Stanford Universities. The student would be based in the Ocean Physics Group within the department of Marine Science at Otago University.
NZ$25,000 scholarships are available to a well qualified international or NZ student. Students need a degree in Physics, Maths, Engineering or Physical Oceanography or related field, along with a strong interest in fluid mechanics and numerical solution to differential equations or CFD modelling. Potential PhD students should email Ross Vennell, outlining their background and experience. To provide more background please include scanned copies of academic transcripts, PDFs of any project or thesis work, plus a brief CV.
References:
[1] Garrett, C. & Cummins, P. The power potential of tidal currents in channels Proc. Royal Society A, 461, 2563-2572 (2005)
[2] Vennell, R., Tuning Turbines in a Tidal Channel, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 663, 253-267 (2010)
[3] Vennell, R., Tuning Tidal Turbines In-Concert to Maximise Farm Efficiency, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 671, 587–604 (2011) pre print
[4] Vennell, R., The Energetics of Large Tidal Turbine Arrays, Renewable Energy, 48 , 210-219 (2012) pre print
[5] Vennell, R., Exceeding the Betz limit with tidal turbines, Renewable Energy, 55, 277-285, (2013) preprint
[6] Divett, T.; R. Vennell and C. Stevens, Optimization of multiple turbine arrays in a channel with tidally reversing flow by numerical modelling with adaptive mesh , Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical and Physical Sciences, 71: 20120251, doi:10.1098/rsta.2012.0251 (2013)
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