Aquanis part of winning ATLANTIS bid

Dr. Todd Griffith, associate professor of mechanical engineering at the university of texas at dallas, demonstrates his blade design for an offshore floating wind turbine. Aquanis is supporting a project under arpa-e’s atlantis program.

Aquanis is proud to be a part of the University of Texas at Dallas’ ATLANTIS development team, led by Professor D. Todd Griffith. The $3M two-year project is funded under ARPA-E’s ATLANTIS program, the goal of which is to re-invent the wind turbine for floating offshore wind energy generation.

The Department of Energy estimates that state and federal waters along the U.S. coasts and the Great Lakes could generate twice the amount of energy consumed by Americans today. But a significant portion of that capacity lies in deep water regions where floating platforms are required and the costs of wind power generation remain high. The goal of the ATLANTIS program is to lower the cost of floating offshore wind energy by re-designing the wind turbine generator and the platform with emerging control technologies.

The team will design a vertical axis wind turbine, or VAWT, which has vertical blades and axis of rotation, rather than the conventional horizontal axis common for today’s utility scale turbines. The VAWT has the advantage of having a lower center of gravity because the generator is located at the base of the tower rather than at the top, leading to a smaller and less expensive platform.

Aquanis is playing a critical role in the project by incorporating active flow control technologies in the design. The Aquanis plasma actuators will enhance the torque generated by the rotor and may reduce vibrations.

In addition to UTD and Aquanis , the team includes XFlow Energy, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, VL Offshore and XFlow Energy.

(Aquanis was renamed Arctura in October, 2020. You can learn about the name change and all of the company’s activities on our website.)