The Mechanical Engineering Department at UT Dallas hosted the Spring 2023 Award Ceremony that celebrated eight categories of outstanding student work, including best paper/dissertation/thesis awards and student organization awards. Students involved in studies and efforts related to wind energy were among the list of awardees, earning four awards.
The list of award winners and categories are below:
Most Supportive and Engaged Undergraduate Student Award – This award recognizes an undergraduate student that is helpful toward their classmates and fosters an environment of collegiality both inside and outside the classroom.
- Winner: Dan Bouzolin (Pictured)
Best Paper Award – This award recognizes the best paper published (undergraduate and graduate) within the last three years.
- Winner: Dongyang Cao (Pictured)
- Paper: Cao, D., Malakooti, S., Kulkarni, V. N., Ren, Y., Liu, Y., Nie, X., Qian, D., Griffith, D. T., & Lu, H. (2021). The effect of resin uptake on the flexural properties of compression molded sandwich composites. Wind Energy, 25(1), 71–93. doi:10.1002/we.2661
Outstanding MS Thesis Award
- Winner: Aditya Bhatt (Award accepted by advisor, pictured)
- Thesis: Data-enhanced Stochastic Dynamical Modeling for Wind Farms
Thesis provides a novel framework for entraining statistics into models of various fidelity that can be used for efficient data-assimilation for the purpose of real-time forecasting of the direction and strength of the incoming wind that will impinge upon turbines.
Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award
- Winner: Matteo Puccioni (Award accepted by advisor, pictured)
- Thesis: Investigation of the organization of turbulence for high Reynolds-number boundary layers through lidar experiments.
The main topic of the project was the investigation of the organization and dynamics of atmospheric turbulence through wind LiDAR measurements for wind energy applications.