Aerodynamic loads and noise emitted from rotating blades are of interest in many industrial applications, such as wind-turbines, aircraft propellers, helicopter blades, and cooling fans. This research project aims to achieve, for the first time, a combined aerodynamic and aeroacoustic optimization of rotary wing by experiments conducted in a controlled environment of gusting flow and rotating motion. In the current work focus will be made on wind-turbine applications. Both passive and active flow control technologies will be utilized to enhance the amount of energy harvested from the wind, while improving the aeroacoustic properties. Leading- and trailing-edge serration have proven to be effective in reducing the noise emitted from wind-turbine blades. However, their effectiveness under realistic flow conditions in a controlled environment has not been investigated. These experiments will be used for further development and validation of new aerodynamic and aeroacoustic models. The ultimate and final goal is to apply closed-loop flow control by utilizing a physics based model. Alongside these experiments, innovative and stand-alone technology for data acquisition and control in rotating blade environments will be developed and implemented. This holistic interdisciplinary approach, bringing together the aerodynamic and aeroacoustic behaviour of wind-turbine blades under realistic flow conditions into one comprehensive study is unique and novel, and will lead to major advances in our understanding of rotating blades aerodynamics and aeroacoustics.

Wireless communication networks are the essential connectivity tissue of the modern digital age. Wireless data traffic is predicted to increase by almost three orders of magnitude in the next five years. It is unlikely that such increase can be tackled by an incremental “more-of-the-same” approach. This proposal stems from the observation that the killer application for wireless networks is on-demand access to Internet content. CARENET advocates a novel content-aware approach to wireless networks design that can provably solve the scalability problem of current systems, thus supporting the paradigmatic shift “from Gigabits per second for a few to Terabytes per month for all”. CARENET’s vision is to serve an arbitrarily large number of users with bounded transmission resources (bandwidth, number of transmit antennas, and power). The fundamental question is: how can such a per-user throughput scalability be achieved in the presence of on-demand requests, for which users do not access simultaneously the same content? CARENET builds on a novel information theoretic formulation of content-aware networks and on several recent results in information theory, network coding, channel coding, and protocol design, stimulated by the PI’s recent work. Key elements of the proposed content-aware architectures are new caching strategies, where content is stored across the wireless network nodes. These strategies are supported by the ever-growing on-board memory of wireless devices and by the new features of the forthcoming 5G-like technology. Our thesis is that scalability is possible through the novel content-aware design, while it is information-theoretically impossible otherwise. Our overarching goal envisions the delivery of one Terabyte per month to each user at an affordable cost and good Quality of Experience, rather than the traditional Gigabit per second peak rates targeted by conventional technology development.