Dr. Luciano Castillo
PhD Department of Mechanical & Aerospace EngineeringRensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Luciano Castillo is an Associate Professor at the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace & Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, an adjunct Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins and at the Universidad del Turabo in Puerto Rico. After completing his Ph.D. degree in Feb 1997 from the State University of New York at Buffalo under the supervision of Prof. William K. George he joined the Mechanical Eng. Faculty at Indiana Institute of Technology and in July of 1999 he joined the Mechanical & Aeronautical Engineering Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He has more than 50 papers published, graduated 8 MS students, 6 PhDs and had 6 visiting scholar in his lab. His research in turbulent boundary layers using experimental techniques, direct numerical simulations and theoretical tools has injected new ideas in turbulent boundary layers. Some of his awards include: the NASA Faculty Fellowship, the Martin Luther
The Importance of Turbulence in Wind Energy
Although wind turbines have been well studied from a blade aerodynamics perspective, the interactions among these massive structures and the atmospheric turbulent boundary layer (ATBL) are still not understood in detail. It is important to understand such interactions in order to maximize the energy that can be extracted from the available wind resource. Past investigations have determined that wind turbines that operate within an array can display a power generation loss of up to 40%, when compared to a freestanding wind turbine. Thus, their ability to extract kinetic energy from the flow decreases due to complex interactions among them, the terrain topography and the atmospheric boundary layer. In order to improve the understanding of the vertical transport of momentum and kinetic energy across a boundary layer flow with wind turbines, a wind-tunnel experiment is performed. The boundary layer flow includes a 3X3 array of model wind turbines. Particle-image-velocity measurements in a volume surrounding a target wind turbine are used to compute mean velocity and turbulence properties averaged on horizontal planes. The impact of vertical transport of kinetic energy due to turbulence and mean flow correlations is quantified. It is found that the fluxes of kinetic energy associated with the Reynolds shear stresses are of the same order of magnitude as the power extracted by the wind turbines, highlighting the importance of vertical transport of turbulence in the boundary layer. Moreover, the streamtube is visualized in order to gain insight into the flow and to test the axisymmetric assumption used for the calculation of the induction factor. Results show that the streamtube is indeed close to axisymmetric, but exhibits some slight distortions due to strong tower effects and shear from the wall.