Passion for clean energy earns graduate student a fellowship

5/30/2014 Lyanne Alfaro

MechSE graduate student Hyun Jin Kim sees a bright future for wind energy in the industry. Prior to attending Illinois, Kim, who earned a mechanical engineering degree from Rice University, worked for an oil and gas company.

Written by Lyanne Alfaro

MechSE graduate student Hyun Jin Kim sees a bright future for wind energy in the industry.

Prior to attending Illinois, Kim, who earned a mechanical engineering degree from Rice University, worked for an oil and gas company.

“The reason I decided to come back to school was because I couldn’t really see a future or meaning in traditional fossil fuels,” Kim said. “Renewable energy is something that I think should be the right direction for the energy industry.”

When MechSE assistant professor Leonardo Chamorro purchased 16 small-scale wind turbines for wind energy research, Kim joined his group in June 2013.

This spring, Kim’s research and vision for an educational partnership with Richland Community College in Decatur, Illinois, helped her win the Clean Energy Education Fellowship. The fellowship recognizes a deserving graduate student committed to investigating and educating others on clean energy.

“With wind farms increasing in number and size, technology needs to address the challenges that come with higher loadings and power output. In general, power losses in wind farms average 10 to 20 percent due to the wake interference. However, wind power technology has primarily been studied on a turbine level, while the farm-level behavior that involves wake turbulence and its interactions with the surrounding environment is still an open problem. Our understanding of it is even more limited when considering the effects of site terrain complexity. Laboratory experiments suggest that topography plays an active role in the performance of a wind farm and requires further investigation,” Kim said.

As a fellow, Kim will receive a stipend during her two years of study plus a full tuition and fees waiver. Kim plans to execute education and research efforts alongside Richland students.

“Richland College faculty and students are actually really into renewable energy. They have a Renewable Energy Training program for work energy sites and also have wind turbines that power the campus. As a highly hands-on experimental research effort, my project complements the Richland program focused on site assessment,” Kim said.

She hopes that her work will bring about new insights for advanced wind energy technology and encourage the students to pursue higher education, especially among women and other underrepresented groups in STEM fields.

“I really want this to be a continuous effort between the University of Illinois and Richland Community College. It’s a great opportunity to deliver cutting-edge knowledge and fundamental quantitative guidelines to more audiences. It’s exactly how I want to use my knowledge after I earn my PhD,” Kim said.
 


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This story was published May 30, 2014.