Resource Assessment
Open-Ocean Turbulence Assessment
Led by
James VanZwieten, Ph.D
Affiliated Home Campus: Boca Raton
Affiliated Department: Southeast National Marine Renewable Energy Center
PROJECT
Ocean turbines experience additional wear due to turbulence in the ocean, properly modeling this turbulence will provide invaluable information for helping to improve the design and maintenance of ocean turbines. This Open-Ocean Turbulence Assessment will provide precise information about the currents in the open-ocean where ocean turbines will be deployed. Specific methods are used to de-spike and clean datasets with a lot of contamination due to low particulate in the water. New techniques are used to create spectra to combat the contamination due to drifting of the boat. The models created by this assessment will be input into turbine models to simulate the effects that this turbulence will have on ocean turbines to help improve the sustainability and maintenance of ocean turbines. This assessment is for the specific case of ocean turbines; however, can be extended to any other ocean projects that make use of current data. In the future these methods can be improved to better combat vertical oscillation of the measuring device and create better spectra for highly contaminated datasets.