Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science

Two small wind turbines atop streetlight poles with the Tilikum Crossing bridge in the background.

Wind energy

What is wind energy? 

Wind energy is typically generated when wind turns the blades of huge wind turbines. Due to their huge size, wind energy faces land use and environmental impact challenges. Offshore wind farms are a common solution, but some factors, such as their efficiency when impacted by waves, are little understood.

What is Wind Energy? 

Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science, Portland State University. pdx.edu/maseeh.

What do we mean when we talk about wind energy?

Wind energy is the way by which these very large machines extract power out of the wind. And they come in the form of very, very large rotors with a tower. And then once the wind is blowing they begin to turn, and that’s when we are generating this power. 

Why does wind energy matter? 

The idea is that you’re extracting energy from the wind, and that wind is never really going to go away any time soon. So it’s sort of a no-brainer, politics aside, that we can use that and extract energy from it. 

How is your lab working to build the future of wind energy? 
Typically, one doesn’t install one turbine only. You install many, many of them, with which you generate a wind farm. And for that wind farm you need a resource: the resource is wind. So the question is, how is it that a wind farm that is in front might impact the next one, right? Because it’s about the resource. 

We have a large wind tunnel, it’s five meters in length. And we can put scaled models in there and increase the wind speed and look at the flow behavior. We’ve removed the floor and we, actually, can fill that now with water. So we can look at offshore wind energy, which is kind of an exciting new field. So these are buoys: They actually float in the water. We have wind incoming here, and it can spin the rotor here, so we can measure how much power it’s actually reading. 

Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science, Portland State University

Thank you for watching! Learn more at pdx.edu/maseeh/power-energy

In the Wind Energy and Turbulence Lab, we are using fluid dynamics to increase the efficiency of offshore wind farms by looking at how the movement of waves impacts the effectiveness of the wind turbines, we well as studying how wind farms communicate with each other across large distances. 

From undergraduates to PhD students, students are essential to the everyday workings the Wind Energy and Turbulence Lab and frequently lead their own experiments. The lab also fosters partnerships across institutions such as Johns Hopkins University. 

Watch the video to see the lab in action.

Wind energy and turbulence lab about this content

The Labs of Maseeh. Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science, Portland State University. pdx.edu/maseeh.

Can you briefly introduce your role and work within the lab? 

Zein Sadek, PhD Student Research, Wind Energy & Turbulence Lab: Alright, here I conduct wind tunnel experiments. And so we use lasers, cameras, and I specialize in particle image velosymmetry, where we basically take pictures of the velocity field in the wind tunnel. 

How does your lab’s research contribute to solving real world problems? 

Here we’re really focused on renewable energies. So we do a lot of wind energy, we also do solar power. We’re actually building some experiment– we’re looking at some advanced technologies that can be further implemented into wind energy science. 

What opportunities do undergraduate students have to participate in research?

Speaker: Rocio Compton, Master’s Student Researcher, Wind Energy and Turbulence Lab: I started as an undergrad doing research. I was able to hop onto projects that other students were working on. And then from there, you can work on things like solar energy, turbine energy, all sorts of renewable energy things. 

How does your lab collaborate with industry partners or other research institutions? 

Madeline Fischer, Master’s Student Researcher, Wind Energy and Turbulence Lab: We have our partners from Johns Hopkins here right now, working on collaborating with their Chemistry department because we’re doing the Mechanical Engineering side, and they’re the experts in the chemical aspects of this experiment. We’re able to collaborate with them, and do our experiments together. 

Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science, Portland State University