Ilan M. L. Upfal
Ilan M. L. Upfal is a PhD student in civil and environmental engineering whose research focuses on sustainable energy system design. With the support of a MathWorks Fellowship, Ilan will expand his work in wind farm design and translate those efforts into industry-ready MATLAB tools. His research aims to consider collective flow control in the optimization of wind farm layouts. Ilan’s work could include two valuable outcomes: a gradient-based optimization approach utilizing automatic differentiation to efficiently solve the high-dimensional control and layout optimization problem, which otherwise would be computationally infeasible using finite-difference-based optimizers, and a physics-based modeling approach that uses a generalized momentum model to accurately predict the impact of turbine control on wind farm power production. Ilan has demonstrated that considering collective flow control during wind farm design yields significantly smaller land-area footprints while reducing the cost of wind energy and increasing the lifetime profit of wind farms. Ilan’s research has the potential to advance wind power that maximally accelerates decarbonization, improves grid reliability, and provides valuable tools for research in aerodynamics, modeling, control, and sustainable power.