Applications are invited for a full-time scholarship available in the School of Computing, Engineering and Physical Sciences. The scholarship is tenable for up to 3 years for a PhD (via MPhil route) [subject to satisfactory progress] and is open to international applicants only. UK/EU applicants are not eligible to apply. The scholarship will provide £15000 towards the cost of the International tuition fee over 3 years. Manufacturing limitations and operational strains placed on wind turbine blades lead to fatigue and a shortened working life. The advent of flexible, aeroelastic blades (rather than rigid forms) will offer advantages in increasing fatigue life but challenges in geometrical, structural and aerodynamic characterisation. Wind tunnel trials do not scale up well to real life blades so that a fundamental understanding of the underlying physics is necessary if innovative large scale flexible blades are to be modelled successfully.
Against this background, the main objectives are:
1. The development of structural dynamic and FEA models for the complete wind turbine rotor or blades that can handle highly nonlinear effects e.g. from flexible blades with complex laminated composite and composite sandwich skins and webs;
2.The development of advanced models on rotor and blade aerodynamics, covering full 3D CFD rotor models, free wake models and improved BEM type models;
3. The advancement of computational mathematical models for the complex fluid-structure interaction problems that play a critical role in wind-turbine blade design, providing also a fundamental tool for a better understanding of the underlying physics;
4. To calculate the torque and thrust on the wind turbine generator under different wind speed and rotor geometry and therefore to predict the material strength needed in different environment and minimize the damage to the rotor.
5. To predict the rotor speed on varying wind speed, rotor geometry, and rotor load. And to simulate both transient state and steady state motion of the rotor, finally optimize the shape of the rotor blade and therefore maximize the power capacity.
Scholarship Application Deadline: 13 May 2011
Further Scholarship Information and Application
