Professor Arijit Banerjee’s group has been researching a wind-energy harvest architecture suitable for offshore wind turbines, which has been funded by the Department of Energy since 2018. They used a 400 W benchtop setup to prove the concept and demonstrated it at a 125 kW power level at the POETS Research and Development Center (see below and youtube link to check out the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8I6LOAICPvY&t=1s).
Scaling up the power by more than 300x brought many practical challenges and surprises, including a moment when the generator was on fire and an episode similar to an “aircrash investigation.” ProfessorBanerjee shared the group’s journey and discussed the architecture, along with results from the high-power testbed.
This item is based on Arijit’s notes as well as an abstract he submitted for the lecture on November 2, 2023.