Professor Dr. Richard Willden

Biography

Professor Richard Willden originally trained as an Aeronautical Engineer at the Department of Aeronautics at Imperial College London, completing his undergraduate studies in 1998. He continued at Imperial College for doctoral and post-doctoral studies until 2002. After a year post-doctoral position at Cambridge, he returned to Imperial College as a Royal Academy Engineering/EPSRC research fellow, conducting research in the areas of bluff body fluid mechanics and flow-induced vibrations. In 2007, Richard transferred his fellowship to Oxford, taking a position as an RCUK academic fellow in marine renewable energy, and became a university lecturer and tutorial fellow at St Edmund Hall in October 2012. He specializes as a fluid dynamicist in offshore fluid mechanics problems, particularly in tidal stream energy generation. His teaching covers a range of topics in thermodynamics and fluid mechanics. His research interests broadly encompass low-speed fluid mechanics, especially bluff body fluid mechanics, marine renewable energy generation, computational fluid dynamics, and fluid-structure interaction. He currently leads extensive research projects in tidal energy generation and supervises a substantial research group in this area. His recent contributions include fundamental analytical work to redefine the upper limits of energy extraction in tidal flows and the development of optimization tools to increase tidal farm energy yields.

Research Interests

Experience