Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

Matt is an adjunct professor in the Earth and Atmospheric Science Department and he leads the Wind Plant Physics Computational Fluid Dynamics group at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. His work focuses on high-fidelity simulation of wind plant aerodynamics using large-eddy simulation. Particularly, he is interested in the behavior of turbulent wind turbine wakes and their interactions with other turbines, other wakes, the atmospheric boundary layer, and complex terrain or offshore conditions. He has also studied wind plant-level controls that increase wind plant performance by reducing wake effects. Matt is one of the lead developers of the open-source, freely available Simulator fOr Wind Farm Applications (SOWFA), a coupled fluid-structure-controls simulation tool specifically for wind plants. Matt's graduate research involved turbulence modeling for aircraft wing tip vortex flows