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One Year Later
Evaluating Infrastructure and Cities Post-pandemic Project
In the last year, the project team has: Q
Conducted interviews with public officials in 26 U.S. and Indian cities regarding challenges faced, adaptive response strategies, partnerships, long-term learnings, and knowledge gaps that have emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. The focus of the interviews was on several physical provisioning systems, including food, water, sanitation, energy, shelter, waste management, mobility, information-communication technologies, and public green spaces.
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Formed partnership with Google to identify opportunities to collaborate and use Google’s mobility data to explore behavior changes during COVID-19 in the United States and in India.
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Hosted a virtual workshop for city stakeholders in April 2021 with over 100 participants from 40 cities, universities, think tanks, and national labs across the globe to discuss findings in the researchers’ draft paper, “Building Back Better: Pandemic-Resilient, Sustainable, and Equitable Cities.”
Optimizing Offshore Wind Farm Design Project
In the last year, the project team has:
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Begun installation of a two-turbine setup in an on-campus wind tunnel to be able to experimentally characterize turbine-turbine interactions, as well as new capabilities for varying the incoming flow, which will be a future target of the computational campaign.
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Developed a new model for computational fluid dynamics simulations to better understand the influence of sea surface waves on offshore wind turbine wakes.
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Conducted preliminary studies to introduce additional physical effects into wind turbine models for computational fluid dynamics simulations. These models will be assessed against experimental measurements in the wind tunnel.
Andlinger Center Grant for Innovative Research in Energy and the Environment Energy Models Under Uncertainty Christos Maravelias is leading a team of researchers in a new project to identify pathways to achieve net-zero emissions by ensuring that the models take into account various types of uncertainty as well as bottlenecks that may arise along each pathway. Maravelias is the Anderson Family Professor in Energy and the Environment and professor of chemical and biological engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. The researchers are developing new modeling techniques and methods that allow models to incorporate the deep and diverse types of uncertainty in energy systems, quantify risk, and identify net-zero emission energy-system pathways that have low risk, rather than simply the lowest cost. These models build on modeling done in the Net-Zero America project, and now consider aspects such as supply-chain constraints, labor shortages, public opposition to changing landscapes and seascapes, environmental justice concerns, the impacts of climate change on energy infrastructure itself, and others. By explicitly modeling uncertainty, the selected transition pathways minimize the risk of failure by identifying a portfolio of alternative mitigation options and allow for pivots along the way. Funding for the Andlinger Center grant for Innovative Research in Energy and the Environment was provided by: Addy/ISN North American Low Carbon Emission Energy Self-Sufficiency Fund; John E. Cross ’72 and Mary Tiffany Cross; de Carvalho-Heineken Family Fund for Environmental Studies; High Meadows Foundation’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment Director’s Fund; Lewis W. van Amerongen ’62 Fund for Energy Research; and anonymous gifts.
