At the March meeting of the ForWind Board of Directors, Prof. Dr. Kerstin Avila from the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg was accepted as a new member of ForWind.
Kerstin Avila’s research and teaching focus on the “Fundamentals of Turbulence and Complex Systems”. This basic research will be used, among other things, to help shape the fluid dynamic developments of future wind turbines. The ForWind WindLab with its turbulent wind tunnel, which went into operation in 2017, offers the best conditions for this. Before accepting the position at the University of Oldenburg, she conducted research at the University of Bremen and the Leibniz Institute for Materials-oriented Technologies Bremen.
Kerstin Avila has been working with turbulence and complex flow behavior since her studies. In 2013, she completed her doctorate at the University of Göttingen and the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization. After working as a visiting researcher at the Institute of Science and Technology in Vienna and as a post-doc at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, she has spent the last few years conducting research at the University of Bremen. In addition to her work on the propagation of turbulence, her research focuses on the analysis of non-linear resonances. She has made significant progress in these topics in international collaborations, such as in the study “Data-driven modeling and prediction of non-linearizable dynamics via spectral submanifolds” (Nature Communications, 2022). As part of a DFG research group, she heads the project “Dynamics and instabilities of pulsating suspension flows in complex pipe geometries”, in which the modern shake-the-box measurement method is used to measure fluid-particle interactions.
Her research complements the broad spectrum of process engineering and physical research in the field of wind energy within ForWind. Around 30 working groups and institutes from the universities of Oldenburg, Hanover and Bremen are currently members of ForWind.
