The Stanford Energy 3.0 Newsletter is published once per quarter. Please see below for the latest issue or browse other issues on the right.
Your connection to innovative energy research at Stanford
 |
Registration Open: April 26, 2016: John Dabiri, Civil and Environmental Engineering
4:30 pm to 6:00 pm
Arrillaga Alumni Center, Fisher Conference Rooms
Tuesday, April 26, 2016, 4:30 - 6:00 pm
Please click here to register.
Talk title: Opportunities and Challenges for Next-Generation Wind Energy
Despite common characterizations of modern wind energy technology as mature, there remains a persistent disconnect between the vast global wind energy resource---which is at least an order of magnitude greater than total global power consumption---and the limited penetration of existing wind energy technologies as a means for electricity generation worldwide. This talk will describe an approach to wind energy harvesting that has the potential to resolve this disconnect by leveraging concepts from unsteady fluid mechanics and biology-inspired engineering. Whereas wind farms consisting of propeller-style turbines produce 2 to 3 watts of power per square meter of the wind farm footprint, full-scale field tests over the past five years have demonstrated that 10x increases in wind farm footprint power density can be achieved by arranging vertical-axis wind turbines in layouts inspired by the configurations of schooling fish and seagrass beds. Opportunities for near-term application of this technology will be discussed, as will remaining challenges for wide-scale implementation of this approach to wind energy.
John Dabiri is a professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering and of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty in 2015, he was Professor of Aeronautics and Bioengineering at Caltech, where he also served as Chairman of the Faculty and Dean of Undergraduate Students. His research focuses on science and technology at the intersection of fluid mechanics, energy and environment, and biology. Recent honors for this work include a MacArthur Fellowship, an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Popular Science magazine named him one of its "Brilliant 10" scientists in 2008. For his research in bio-inspired wind energy, Bloomberg Businessweek magazine listed him among its Technology Innovators in 2012, and MIT Technology Review magazine named him one of its 35 innovators under 35 in 2013. In 2014, he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
Spring 2016 Energy Seminar Series
The weekly Energy Seminar, chaired by Professor John Weyant and managed by the Precourt Institute for Energy and the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford, informs the Stanford community about a wide range of energy and climate change issues and perspectives. The audience includes: faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students, and staff from Stanford's seven schools and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, as well as energy professionals from the community.
The Energy Seminar is held on Monday afternoons, 4:30-5:20, throughout the academic year and the upcoming schedule is available on our Future Seminars page. The seminar is offered as a for-credit course for Stanford students (CEE 301/ENERGY 301/MS&E 494) and is also free and open to the public.
|
Featured News
Partners in Discovery: SLAC and Stanford
On an oak-studded hillside a mere two miles from Stanford University lies the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Run by Stanford for the DOE, SLAC is home to a 2-mile-long linear accelerator, a synchrotron and the world's most powerful X-ray laser. Experiments there probe everything from the most intricate molecular details of artwork or cellular structures to the origins of the universe and materials for better batteries.
The relationship between SLAC and Stanford goes back 60 years, to a meeting where Stanford physicists helped plot construction of the linear accelerator. Since that time, collaborations between Stanford and SLAC scientists contributed to four Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry. Now their proximity supports several joint research centers and institutes and creates unparalleled opportunities for Stanford faculty and students to investigate the world we live in and solve real-world challenges.
For more information, please see the complete article. |
