This is a past event
The UK is surrounded by waters with some of the highest tidal velocities and tidal ranges worldwide, and this places us in an exceptionally favourable position to exploit the tides for the generation of electricity. The lecture will explore some of the ways that we can understand the tides and estimate how much energy we could extract from this resource. To do so we need to understand the interactions between turbines and tidal flows at every scale from the design of a single turbine blade up to an entire geographical region.
Some of the technologies being proposed to extract energy from the tides will be described, and progress compared to the development of the offshore wind power industry, with which there are many parallels.
Guy Houlsby has been Professor of Civil Engineering at Oxford University since 1991, and is currently Head of the Department of Engineering Science.
His main research was for many years in geotechnical engineering, and he is an internationally recognised expert on offshore foundations. He has also carried out extensive work in theoretical soil mechanics and plasticity theory. Recently he has developed a particular interest in renewable energy, and has a rapidly expanding research group working on tidal power. He regularly lectures in the U.K. and abroad, and has acted as a specialist consultant in civil, geotechnical and offshore engineering on many projects. He is a Director of the recently formed company Kepler Energy Ltd, which is developing tidal power systems using the novel “Transverse Horizontal Axis Water Turbine” (THAWT). He is a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers and of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
- Speaker
- Professor Guy T. Houlsby, Professor of Civil Engineering, Oxford University
- Hosted by
- School of Engineering, University of Aberdeen
- Venue
- King's College Conference Centre, University of Aberdeen
- Contact
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If you have any questions about the lecture, please contact Katy Bowman in the University Events Office on 01224 273233 or email katy.bowman@abdn.ac.uk