Recent Projects
Current Project:
Monotonic and Cyclic Behavior of Light-Frame Wood Shear Walls Applied with Elastomeric Adhesives
Current Research:
Developing Distributed Real-Time Hybrid Simulation for Dynamic Response Evaluation of Floating Wind Turbine
Floating wind turbine (FWT) has a significant role in producing clean and sustainable energy in unlimited spaces with more steady wind and less cost. The design, construction, and safe operation of FWTs require a deep understanding of their dynamic responses under combined aerodynamic and hydrodynamic loads. Conventional experiments of FWT are often carried out using water tanks and wind tunnels in dynamic response evaluation of FWTs. However, the laboratory size and capacity and the scaling conflicts between the Froude and the Reynold numbers in the coupled wind-wave loading tests of FWT further impose challenges in FWT experiments. To address the scaling issue in the coupled test, real-time hybrid simulation (RTHS) was proposed to be applied to FWT, which combines numerical simulation and physical experiment of FWT substructures in real-time to achieve system-level responses. Furthermore, distributed RTHS (dRTHS) leverages available large-scale wind tunnels and water tanks that are geographically distributed to perform large-to-full-scale FWT experiments. In this research, a dRTHS testing method is proposed for realistic dynamic response evaluation of the FWT structure. To develop the dRTHS testing method, the equation of motion (EOM) was established and then partitioned into two equations representing the wind turbine tower and platform substructures to model the dynamic response of a prototype FWT structure with Tension-Leg Platform (TLP) under the combined aerodynamic and hydrodynamic loads. The substructure simulation was conducted first followed by a numerical simulation of dRTHS (virtual dRTHS or vdRTHS). Two distributed real-time controllers were utilized in vdRTHS to simulate the physical testing of the two substructures tested in the wind tunnel and water tank, respectively, with interface data communicating to each other through the network in real-time. The responses from these vdRTHS are in good agreement with the numerical simulation of the whole FWT structure. To further demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed dRTHS testing method and pave the road for large-scale dRTHS of FWTs in near future, the physical dRTHS experiment is planned to be conducted on a scaled model subjected to aerodynamic and hydrodynamic loads simultaneously.
Recent Project: MI-LSAMP
The Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LSAMP) program is an alliance with the goal of assisting universities and colleges in the diversification of the STEM workforce. The LSAMP program awards historically underrepresented groups in STEM disciplines: African Americans, Hispanic Americans, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and Native Pacific Islanders.
During the summer of 2021, two students were selected to participate in Adhesive Classification Research at the Bronco Construction Research Center (BCRC), which is housed within Western Michigan Universities College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Sneha Nath and Israel Medrano were the students in charge under mentor supervision responsible for producing a classification system based on mechanical and qualitative properties of high-performance adhesives. The mechanical properties were obtained through testing and parameters defined by ASTM standards. Ancillary to the LSAMP program, the test results, which were not only repeatable, but also, validated the capability of the Center to perform standardized small-scale testing.