ACEP intern dives into hydrokinetic research on the Tanana River
August 24, 2023
Eli Willett (left) and Leo Azizi (right) work at the Tanana River Test Site.
This article is part of a series highlighting ACEP’s 2023 cohort of eighteen undergraduate interns. To read about other projects and learn more about the program, please visit the ACEP Internship Program website.
Eli Willett’s internship with ACEP this summer centered around hydrokinetic research on the Tanana River. Willett is an upcoming sophomore at Virginia Tech. He studies ocean engineering, a niche discipline of engineering with wide applications ranging from naval design to hydrokinetic power.
Willett’s work at ACEP took place at the Tanana River Test Site in Nenana, about an hour south of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Troth Yeddha’ Campus. He worked with mentor Stephanie Fisher, who has been running the test site for the last seven years. Fisher also manages the Pacific Marine Energy Center (PMEC) lab, which is part of the Energy Technology Facility (ETF) on campus. Also working with Willett was Leo Azizi, PMEC’s research technician. The three spent most of their time setting up equipment and assisting with testing and data collection.
Many other people joined them at the site during testing, including two engineers from BladeRunner Energy, research engineers Paul Duvoy and Emily Browning taking the lead on data acquisition, Mark Evans conducting fisheries interaction data collection, and mechanical engineer Ben Loeffler, who designed some of the equipment at the site.
All the collected data goes towards plans for hydrokinetic power throughout Alaska and other places with similar potential from fast moving water. The Tanana River flows swiftly, between 1.5-2 m/s on average and can increase to above 3 m/s depending on water level, which is about the pace of speed walking. The turbines that are deployed use this water velocity to generate a substantial amount of energy that can potentially be utilized to deliver power to remote communities and many other purposes. Willett hopes that in the future, the research he has assisted with this summer will lead to more hydrokinetic power being used across Alaska, other states, and other countries.
Through his internship, Willett gained a lot of insight into how testing is done and into hydrokinetic research as a growing field with a lot of potential.
“It's really cool seeing the process of how we deploy equipment in the river and measure what it is doing, and seeing first-hand how much power we are generating.”
His hands-on work provided him with opportunities to learn about different instruments and devices used in the field and why they are important, as well as to be flexible.
Testing setup at the Tanana River Test Site.
“We have faced a lot of challenges that delayed our work and made it difficult to complete our testing, which means we always have to be thinking of ways to solve problems and fix[ing] things,” he said.
This internship is funded by the Office of Naval Research through the ACEP Undergraduate Summer Internship program. View the final presentation for this project on ACEP’s YouTube Channel. For more information on this project, please contact Stephanie Fisher at sjump@alaska.edu.