Dr. Todd Griffith of the University of Texas at Dallas has been working to create an offshore turbine that makes wind energy in deep ocean water more accessible.
Inside his laboratory stands a 6-foot-tall wind turbine that looks like an upside-down eggbeater; it’s actually a small-scale prototype for a radically different type of offshore wind turbine.
Griffith and his team of University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) researchers recently demonstrated through extensive testing that the prototype works. The design shows promise for capturing untapped potential energy from wind blowing across deep ocean water.
The next step is to build and test the design on a larger scale, as high as 500 feet tall. Ultimately, the offshore turbine would stand up to 900 feet tall, about the height of a 72-story skyscraper, and generate electricity from winds over the deep ocean miles from the coast and out of view from land.
Read the entire story HERE.
Learn more about how researchers in the Wind Energy Center at UTD are working to advance wind energy science and engineering in this YouTube video below.
The Wind Energy Center conducts fundamental and applied research primarily in blades and rotors; control systems; fluid flows, materials and structural modeling and measurements; digital twins for wind turbines and their primary components; energy storage and grid integration. UTD Wind provides solutions to the wind power industry and works on novel turbine and system-level designs for land-based and offshore wind power. The center is composed of faculty members, research and administrative staff, and graduate and undergraduate students. UTD Wind was founded in 2020 and is headquartered in Richardson, Texas.
