If I have done anything in my research life that I can say has directly benefitted the whole planet, it would be the work I did as a research engineer at KU Leuven in Belgium. I came up with a method to optimise the layout of a windfarm without the need for a super-computer. In other words, I introduced a method that allows engineers who want to design a windfarm to locate the wind turbines in such a way that can significantly increase the energy extracted from the windfarm, without incurring any extra costs. Also, my simulations showed that the rectangular grid which is a typical layout in many older windfarma is the worst possible layout. The following image can give you an idea why.
![](https://cdn.myportfolio.com/e941744e-23f4-4275-8005-2ec78a6e0ad4/b736f6c2-07e8-47e0-80a6-9c23145e498d_rw_1200.png?h=505d2629adf13f32fc2ed53a8932b955)
To know the context, look at the above video. It is a visualisation of a typical simulation I used to perform. To simulate the flow of wind in a windfarm, one needs t to solve Navier-Stokes equations. I used Large Eddy Simulations (LES) method to approximate the solution of the Navier-Stokes equations and for a typical simulation of a wind farm with 1km x 3km x 4km dimensions for an hour of implementation time, I needed to use 160 cores of the Flemish Super-Computer for a few hours. If we want to optimise the layout of a windfarm, we need to run such a simulation many times. Which makes it computationally intractable. What I did, was to show that using an analytical model, if it is calibrated in a certain way, we can approximate the output of the LES simulations with an accuracy of more than 90%.
If you are interested to know more about the technical details, you can look at this open-access paper we published in Wind Energy Systems, a journal published by the European Academy of Wind Energy.