Welcome: Mercator-Fellow Prof. Cal!

"The proposed experiments investigate the problem of successive wind farm wake interactions with the possibility of developing reduced-order representations of use to industry and national laboratories. As new wind farms are constructed in areas with high wind resource availability, additional growth leads to decreased distances between neighbouring wind farms. Wind farm wakes can extend 50 km or more downstream yet 90% of wind farms are located within 40 km of a neighboring plant, “stealing the wind” from each other. We are performing wind tunnel experiments on two large wind farms and their interactions by performing particle image velocimetry to access the wake."

Raúl Bayoán Cal is the Daimler Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Portland State University; a faculty member since 2010. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2006. During 2006 to 2009, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University. His area of research is focused on understanding fluid flow phenomena as it relates to physical systems such as turbulence with emphasis placed on physics related of wall-bounded, free-shear and multi-phase flows as well as wind/solar energy, and capillary microfluidics with interests in both terrestrial and space applications.