Dr. Amanda Smyth

Biography

Amanda Smyth holds an MEng in Mechanical Engineering from Imperial College London (2011-2015) and a PhD in tidal turbine fluid mechanics from the University of Cambridge (Murray Edwards College, 2015-2019). In 2019-2020, she worked as a research associate at the Whittle Laboratory in the Cambridge University Engineering Department, following an EPSRC Doctoral Fellowship Award. She commenced her Career Development Fellowship at St Hugh's College, Oxford, in October 2020 and was appointed as a Departmental Lecturer in the Oxford Department of Engineering Science in 2024. Her main research area is unsteady fluid dynamic interactions concerning aerofoils, wings, and rotor blades, with a particular focus on the effects of 3D flow geometry. This research primarily targets applications in offshore renewable energy devices, such as wind and tidal turbines, as well as bio-inspired robotic propulsion. Amanda's past work has notably examined the limitations of 2D strip-theory approaches to wing and rotor modelling, especially as applied to tidal turbine blades, which often feature highly three-dimensional shapes. Her current efforts concentrate on developing physics-based low-order models for accurate load and resource estimation and on novel turbine-and farm-scale control strategies for enhanced power generation. She has also explored kinematics in undulatory swimming for soft robotics applications, currently supervising projects on innovative design methodologies for bio-inspired underwater propulsion mechanics.

Research Interests