Awards for Modelling and Simulation of Wind Turbines and Wind Tunnel Testing

Munich. The foundation ”Stiftung Maurer Söhne“ awarded the MSc thesis of
Judith Hess and the PhD thesis of Máté-Tamás Péntek in the fields of structural
dynamics and technical mechanics in summer 2024. The foundation Stiftung
Maurer Söhne awards every year the most outstanding PhD, MSc and BSc
theses in the field of technical dynamics.
In 2024 two excellent R&D works were awarded the prize foundation Stiftung
Maurer Söhne of total € 2,000.
Judith Hess received the prize money of € 1,000 for her MSc thesis ”Virtual
Sensing of Wind Turbine Tower Loads using Kalman Filtering“. The topic of
her thesis was the model-based state and fatigue load estimations of wind
turbines. The MSc thesis was supervised by Prof. Dr. Eng. Gerhard Müller of
the Technical University of Munich (TUM).
Máté-Tamás Péntek received the same prize money for his PhD thesis ”Method
Development for the Numerical Wind Tunnel in Applied Structural Engineering“.
In his PhD thesis, he combined CFD and structural dynamics modelling to simu-
late wind channel testing. Prof. Dr. Eng. Kai-Uwe Bletzinger of TUM supervised
the PhD thesis.
The prize winners were selected by the prize committee of the Department Civil
and Environmental Engineering (CEE) of TUM School of Engineering and Design.
The prizes were handed over on July 5 on the CEE Department Day.
Universities are obliged to focus on project-related research due to their limited
budget. The industry commonly aims at product development. In contrast,
basic research shall be free of development goals and independent of potential
economic benefits. Therefore, the foundation Stiftung Maurer Söhne aims at
supporting R&D projects at the interface of civil and mechanical engineering.