Biography
Dr Farman is a Chartered Engineer with over ten years industrial experience prior to moving into academia. She worked on a range of products including gas turbines, earth moving equipment and wave energy turbines. Her work has included most steps of the design cycle from initial concept design through to commissioning and testing. While continuing her work in industry she undertook a PhD at Cranfield University. Her PhD research focused on modelling the behaviour of oscillating water columns and developing suitable control strategies for optimal power extraction. She has been a researcher at the Whittle Laboratory, University of Cambridge, since 2015. Her research has included the development of load shedding devices for tidal stream turbines; developing data acquisition systems for rotating machinery; aero-engine compressor bleed design and future electric propulsion concepts.
Publications
Improving tidal turbine efficiency using winglets
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The cost effectiveness of a tidal stream turbine can be improved by maximising the power extracted for a given rotor diameter. This paper presents a numerical and experimental study showing that winglets could be used to this end. The numerical simulations were conducted using Tornado, a vortex lattice code, which can model the interaction between different spanwise sections unlike Blade Element Momentum methods. Tornado was used to identify the important winglet design parameters such as dihedral angle. Tornado cannot capture viscous effects and so an experimental study was conducted on four designs. These were tested on a small-scale horizontal axis turbine in the Ifremer flume tank. The impact of winglets on the blade spanwise flow was found to have a significant effect on the amount of loss generated. The inviscid code used in this paper could complement existing quasi-3D design tools.
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Wireless RF telemetry for rotating frame data acquisition and control
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Obtaining measurements in the rotating frame of reference requires either real-time communication between the rotating and stationary frames, or temporary data storage in the rotating frame. Rotating telemetry systems must be low-noise and high-bandwidth, which is hard to achieve using traditional slip-ring arrangements, while using temporary data storage introduces synchronisation issues. In this paper, the use of wireless telemetry for real-time data acquisition is demonstrated for two applications: tidal turbine load control and large-scale turbine pressure measurements.
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