The 6th RV Jones Distinguished Lecture in Engineering - Tidal Power: Opportunities for the UK

The 6th RV Jones Distinguished Lecture in Engineering - Tidal Power: Opportunities for the UK
-

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. This lecture in the RV Jones Lecture series will explore some of the ways that we can understand the tides and estimate how much energy we could extract from this resource.

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.

Taking the latest lecture in the RV Jones series is Guy Houlsby - Professor of Civil Engineering at Oxford University since 1991, and 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.

Admission is FREE however please book in advance to ensure a place is reserved.

Speaker
Professor Guy T. Houlsby, University of Oxford
Hosted by
School of Engineering
Venue
King's College Conference Centre, University of Aberdeen
Contact
events@abdn.ac.uk