Seminar will held at Conference Room, Old Hydraulic Engineering, Tsinghua University, 11:00am Friday 1st June 2012
Green Energy from the Sea
Professor Alistair G. L. Borthwick
Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, University College Cork, Ireland
Abstract
With the demise of fossil fuels, the World is facing an unprecedented energy crisis. Demand for energy massively increased over the 20th Century due to population growth, industrial development, and technological advances. This seminar will briefly review the energy situation, then compare and contrast different forms of green energy, before concentrating on marine renewable energy – in other words, energy from the sea. There are several main types of marine renewable energy device; namely: tidal turbine, tidal barrier, wave energy converter, and offshore wind turbine. Of particular importance is the environmental impact of such devices; for example, the damping effect on tides by the presence of a farm of tidal turbines. The lecture shall consider a means of including tidal devices in a coastal basin model, and thus estimating the influence of such devices on the flow field and sediment transport.
Brief CV
In October 2011, Alistair Borthwick took up the position of Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at University College Cork, Ireland. The professorship at University College Cork is one of the oldest in the world, the first professor being appointed in 1845. Prof. Borthwick was previously a Professor of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, where he worked for 21 years. Alistair Borthwick is an adjunct Professor at Peking University where has carried out collaborative research for many years on the sustainable management of water resources. He is also an Emeritus Fellow at St Edmund Hall Oxford. He has more than 30 years’ experience in civil, coastal, and offshore engineering. Prof. Borthwick’s research interests include shallow water-sediment flows, flood risk, and river basin eco-systems), coastal processes, offshore engineering, marine renewable energy, and water resources engineering. He has co-authored more than 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals, and supervised more than 30 doctoral students to completion.
