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More InformationKerstin Avila Canellas &
Andreas Fischer
The rotor blades of modern wind turbines are being built increasingly thin and slender. What effects this has is being investigated in a joint project by Prof. Dr. Andreas Fischer, head of the Bremen Institute for Metrology, Automation and Quality Science (BIMAQ), and Prof. Dr. Kerstin Avila Canellas, Professor of Fundamentals of Turbulence and Complex Systems at the University of Oldenburg.
Transkript
00:01 – 00:10
Andreas Fischer: A major challenge in industry is understanding how the airflow and the movement of the rotor blade interact with each other. We chose that as our shared challenge.
00:10 – 00:23
Kerstin Avila Canellas: And it’s a perfect match.
Question: What do you achieve together that you wouldn’t be able to achieve alone?
00:23 – 00:45
Andreas Fischer: What we fundamentally want to achieve is for the expertise based in Oldenburg – namely flow physics – and the engineering expertise based at the University of Bremen to grow even closer together. We believe that this can unlock a great deal of potential for wind energy research. There are still many questions that need to be answered.
Question: What stands out about your colleague?
00:46 – 00:52
Kerstin Avila Canellas: It’s great that he’s someone who wants to push the boundaries of measurement technology and examine accuracy down to the smallest detail.
00:52 – 01:06
Andreas Fischer: I’d add that as an engineer, I don’t want to be the one explaining flow physics. It’s a great thing to always have in the back of my mind that there’s someone who’s an expert in flow physics. We had always been waiting for the opportunity to finally work together.
Question: What does your collaboration look like?
01:06 – 01:29
Kerstin Avila Canellas: Wind turbines are everywhere. If you pay a bit of attention, you’ll notice that the newer ones are bigger than the older ones. In other words, they keep growing. The blades are becoming thinner, lighter, and more flexible. Wind conditions are becoming increasingly inhomogeneous, and that causes the blades to vibrate much more. That is currently one of the biggest challenges for new, modern turbines – being able to predict and describe that interaction.
01:29 – 01:48
Andreas Fischer: Yes, measurement technology always has a special appeal, or a special benefit, when it’s applied to find something out. That’s what we want to do here, using wind energy systems as an example. But what we then measure isn’t something that falls within my expertise alone, which is where we need flow physicists.
01:48 – 02:01
Kerstin Avila Canellas: In Oldenburg, we can recreate turbulent wind conditions in a way that’s not possible anywhere else in the world. With our new method, we can then measure information on the rotor blades without attaching any additional sensors.
02:01 – 02:12
Andreas Fischer: We definitely have quite a number of students who are very interested in this topic. They’re actually accompanying us now in this early phase of growing together and supporting us in teaching projects.
02:12 – 02:26
Kerstin Avila Canellas: The trigger that sparked the collaboration was the Northwest Alliance, with funding specifically intended to kick-start short-term projects and enable joint preliminary work. That was the moment it all came together, and we said: “Now let’s do this.”
Question: What are the benefits of your partnership?
02:26 – 02:34
Andreas Fischer: What we gain from it is that in the future we’ll be able to use wind energy that’s even cheaper and even cleaner.