It has been an exciting year for the Tyler Lewis Clean Energy Research Foundation. With another successful Ride for Clean Energy, and for the first time since the Foundation’s inception, the awarding of two grants, there has been no lack of progress. Additional successes are the extraordinary work and milestones that have been achieved by Matthieu Boudreau, the 2016 TLCERF grant recipient.
Since awarding Matthieu the grant, he has had a very productive year of research, publishing and presenting his work internationally. Below is a list of some his project achievements over the past year:
- The experimental campaign on their first fully-passive flapping-foil turbine prototype was a huge success and the work was presented at the APS DFD Conference (Portland, OR) in November 2016. A peer reviewed journal article highlighting these results will be published in the very near future.
- A much simpler concept/design was proposed and tested, achieving better performance than what was obtained with a fully-constrained flapping-foil turbine. This work was presented this past November at the 2017 APS DFD Conference (Denver, CO), during which the Tyler Lewis Clean Energy Research Foundation was gratefully acknowledged. The results and the new research avenues that have been consequently opened because of these results, have been enthusiastically received by the scientific community.
- Matthieu and his team are planning to conduct another experimental campaign at the University of Victoria, BC, next spring, to test and validate some design aspects of the turbine that cannot be studied by numerical simulations.
- In 2017, Matthieu published three peer reviewed journal articles as a first author concerning different hydrokinetic turbine technologies. Additionally, Matthieu was a co-author for a journal paper proposing a novel heat insulating wall composed of a vertical stack of air-filled enclosures.
Since being awarded the grant, the project has grown considerably. Matthieu is now mentoring an undergraduate student who is working on the project. Additionally, a research professional will join their team in January.