Room: 5-314
Speaker Name:
Georgios (Yorgos) Deskos
Affiliation:
Senior Offshore Wind Engineer,
National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Abstract:
Offshore wind in the South Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Hawaii has a combined resource capacity of more than 1,000 GW; however, exposure to major hurricanes (Category 3 and above) may limit deployment opportunities. To overcome these challenges, more advanced design methods are needed. Hurricane-prone regions may require adaptations of current turbine designs to achieve the same structural reliability as turbines in other regions, however reliable physics-driven guidance is lacking. The current design approach is based on wind turbine standards established by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). For aerodynamic load analysis, a “tropical” Class T turbine has been defined which assumes that only the reference 10-minute average wind speed, VRef,T, needs to be adjusted from 50 m/s to 57 m/s. Similarly, a subset of metocean conditions related to the wave, and combined wave/current design loads were recently added to the standards including a robustness check that requires using a 500-year return period instead of the conventional 50-year period. While elevating reference values may require turbine designers to ultimately strengthen blades, towers, and other components, it may overlook the nuanced dynamics of hurricane events and the possibility that other damaging design load cases might exist in the form of extreme microscale vorticity, large wind veer and shear levels, rapid wind direction changes and strong wind updrafts, bimodal seas, as well as strong wind/wave misalignment. In this seminar, I will present a holistic, multi-scale/multi-physics approach to model the extreme wind and wave fields during the passage of tropical cyclones and discuss how the generated data can help enhance our understanding of the design load cases, upgrade wind turbine design best practices, and ultimately help improving formulations within design standards.
Biography:
Georgios is a Senior Offshore Wind Engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) focusing on high-fidelity, multi-physics modeling of offshore wind energy systems including the impact of atmospheric turbulence, wind-wave interaction, and extreme events such as tropical cyclones on offshore wind turbines. His research focuses on understanding risks associated with offshore wind energy systems as well as improving wind turbine/farm designs to help unlock the offshore wind energy potential at a global scale. Georgios holds a PhD in Earth Science and Engineering from Imperial College London as well as an MSc and Meng in Civil Engineering from Virginia Tech and the National Technical University of Athens, respectively.