Nicholas’ expertise is in turbulent fluid mechanics, applied mathematics, and dynamical systems. He has experience in wind tunnel experiments, field observations and remote sensing, and numerical modeling. At NREL, Nicholas supports work in wind plant controls and turbulent wind plant flow dynamics through experimentation and data science. He is the principle investigator of the Aeroacoustic Assessment of Wind Plant Controls project and leads the simulation group within the American WAKE experiment project.

Research Interests

Wind turbine wake aerodynamics

Reduced-order modeling and dynamical systems

Wind turbine aeroacoustics

Education

Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering, Portland State University

M.S., Aerospace Engineering, École Centrale de Lille

B.S., summa cum laude, Mechanical Engineering, Portland State University

Professional Experience

Researcher III - Mechanical Engineering, NREL (2017—current)

Research Associate, Portland State University (2014–2017)

Associations and Memberships

Member, American Physical Society, Division of Fluid Dynamics

Member, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Oregon Chapter

Featured Work

Development of coherent structures in complex terrain, Bulletin of the American Physical Society. (2018)

A generalized framework for reduced-order modeling of a wind turbine wake, Wind Energy. (2018)

Classification of the Reynolds stress anisotropy tensor in very large thermally stratified wind farms using colormap image segmentation, Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy. (2019)

Turbulence kinetic energy budget and conditional sampling of momentum, scalar, and intermittency fluxes in thermally stratified wind farms, Journal of Turbulence (2019)

Atmospheric condition identification in multivariate data through a metric for total variation, Atmospheric Measurement Techniques. (2020)

Conference Papers

Validation of FAST. Farm Against Large-Eddy Simulations, Journal of Physics. (2018)

Validation of Wind Power Plant Modeling Approaches in Complex Terrain, AIAA Scitech. (2019)

Effects of Inflow Spatiotemporal Discretization on Wake Meandering and Turbine Structural Response using FAST. Farm, Journal of Physics (2019)

Highlighting the impact of yaw control by parsing atmospheric conditions based on total variation. (2020)

National Wind Technology Center-Characterization of Atmospheric Conditions, National Renewable Energy Lab. (2019)

FAST. Farm Response to Varying Wind Inflow Techniques, National Renewable Energy Lab. (2019)

Awards and Honors

NREL Outstanding Mentor Award (2018)