Posted: January 12, 2021

Dr. Jonkman (top left) with the OWHSF team, including Drs. Justin Jaworski (MEM), Arindam Banerjee (MEM), Richard Sause (CEE) & Muhannad Suleiman (CEE). Not pictured: Drs. James Ricles (CEE) & Mohamed Mekkawy (Fugro USA).

In November, I-CPIE’s Offshore Wind Hybrid Simulation Facility (OWHSF) hosted the first seminar of its Offshore Wind seminar series. Dr. Jason Jonkman, a Senior Engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), was the guest speaker. His talk, Engineering Modeling to Advance Wind Energy Technology, summarized the U.S. Department of Energy-funded work that NREL  is doing to develop, verify, validate, and apply physics-based engineering tools that enable the wind energy community to design advanced wind technology that will lower wind cost of energy.

Dr. Jonkman noted that almost 80% of U.S. electricity demand is located in coastal states, which has offshore wind energy technical resource potential equal to about 2,000 gigawatts. Because offshore wind has the potential to contribute significantly to a clean, affordable, and secure national energy mix, prospects are excellent for the emergence of a viable U.S. offshore wind industry. The rapid technology innovation required to support this goal is only possible with accurate, validated, physics-based engineering design competence and tools. 

At NREL, Dr. Jonkman leads a team that develops advanced wind turbine and wind plant physics-based engineering tools for modeling the dynamic response and structural loading of land-based and offshore fixed and floating wind turbines, including the state-of-the-art aero-hydro-servo-elastic tool OpenFAST and wind plant wake and array dynamics tool FAST.Farm.  He co-leads the International Energy Agency Wind Task 30 OC6 project, which focuses on validating tools for offshore wind turbine design.  He is also a member of the International Electrotechnical Commission maintenance team to develop international design requirements for floating offshore wind turbines. 

This seminar was hosted by the OWHSF, a Department of Energy-funded project to upgrade Lehigh’s soil-foundation interaction testing facility by acquiring new capabilities and to develop a coupled aero-hydro-mechanical hybrid simulation approach to accurately model U.S. field conditions in the laboratory and simulate current and next-generation fixed-bottom and floating offshore wind turbines. The new testing capabilities and hybrid simulation approach will be used to perform pilot projects simulating U.S.-specific environments. These efforts will be accompanied by a marketing campaign to broaden the user base of the facility and develop collaborative projects.

Principal Investigator Muhannad Suleiman, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, said, "we are very excited to launch this seminar series with Dr. Jonkman as part of our effort to further offshore wind energy research at Lehigh." For information on future seminars, visit https://icpie.lehigh.edu/featured-programs/offshore-wind-hybrid-simulation-facility-owhsf/offshore-wind-seminar-series