About

Michael Selig is a Professor Emeritus and Research Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His academic background includes a Ph.D. from The Pennsylvania State University in Aerospace Engineering, an M.S.E. from Princeton University in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and a B.S. from the University of Illinois in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering. His research interests encompass applied aerodynamics, airfoil design and analysis, wind energy systems, flight simulation and modeling, and aircraft design, performance, stability, and control. Throughout his career, Selig has contributed significantly to the field of low-speed aerodynamics and wind energy. He has authored and co-authored multiple editions of 'Summary of Low-Speed Airfoil Data' and has been involved in various research projects related to airfoil testing, wind turbine rotor design, and UAV aerodynamics. His work includes the development of airfoil design methodologies, wind tunnel testing, and the creation of online tools for airfoil and wind turbine analysis. Selig's expertise is recognized through his role as an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and his extensive consulting activities with industry leaders in aerospace and wind energy sectors.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Aerospace engineering
• Marine engineering
• Engineering
• Environmental science
• Structural engineering
• Mechanical engineering
• Physics
• Automotive engineering
• Meteorology
• Electrical engineering

Selected publications

• Aerodynamic rotor design for a 25 MW offshore downwind turbine

  Applied Energy · 2023-10-18 · 14 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Detection of cracks in concrete using near-IR fluorescence imaging

  Scientific Reports · 2023-11-02 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  Structural health monitoring of civil infrastructure is a crucial component of assuring the serviceability and integrity of the built environment. A primary material used in the construction of civil infrastructure is concrete, a material that is susceptible to cracking due to a variety of causes, such as shrinkage, creep, overloading, and temperature change. Cracking reduces the durability of concrete structures, as it allows deleterious environmental agents to penetrate the surface, causing such damage as corrosion of steel reinforcement and delamination of the concrete itself. Conventional crack detection techniques are limited in scope due to issues relating to pre-planning, accessibility, and the need for close proximity to the test surface. Contactless optical image monitoring techniques offer the opportunity to overcome these limitations and have the potential to detect cracks at a distance. Concrete has been reported to have a near-infrared (Near-IR) fluorescence line at a wavelength of 1140 nm when excited with red light. This work investigates the use of fluorescence imaging for the detection of cracks in cementitious surfaces using shallow angle incidence excitation red light. Light oriented at a shallow angle does not excite interior surfaces of cracks, which appear as darker features in images of fluorescing concrete. Artificial cracks with widths of 0.2-1.5 mm were readily imaged using a near-IR camera at distances of 0.5 and 1.3 m. An additional concrete sample with a 0.08 mm wide crack was produced using a flexure apparatus and was also imaged. It is worth noting that the 0.08 mm crack was detected despite its width being below the 0.1 mm pixel resolution of the camera, with the aid of digital image enhancement algorithms.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Aero-structural rapid screening of new design concepts for offshore wind turbines

  Renewable Energy · 2023-10-25 · 17 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Aerodynamic Rotor Design for a 25 MW Offshore Downwind Turbine

  2023-06-08

  article

  View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2023-3525.vid The advantages of continuously increasing wind turbine scales necessitate aeroelastic rotor design strategies to maximize performance. In this study, three downwind 25 MW rotors were designed with an aim of high power production with low rotor weight. To achieve this objective, the swept area was maximized by adjusting pre-cone and shaft tilt angles such that the aeroelastic orientation of an upward pointing blade was nearly vertical near rated conditions. The power coefficient was maximized by using an inverse rotor design tool in which axial induction factor and lift coefficient distributions were prescribed. To determine lift coefficient distributions, a design space was created based on a combination of maximum lift and maximum lift/drag conditions. For the flatback airfoils, empirical correlations were used to adjust for drag and maximum lift coefficient. Once the design space was created, three lift coefficient distributions were chosen which results in three rotors of small, medium, and large chords. The resulting rotors were simulated for performance and optimized for minimum mass using OpenFAST. The results indicated that the medium chord provided the best performance, producing the highest power coefficient and the lowest rotor mass. This approach can be used for other extreme-scale (upwind and downwind) turbines.

  PublisherDOI

• Active rotor coning for a 25 MW downwind offshore wind turbine

  Journal of Physics Conference Series · 2022-05-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract A two-bladed downwind turbine system was upscaled from 13.2 MW to 25 MW by redesigning aerodynamics, structures, and controls. In particular, three 25-MW rotors were developed, and the final version is a fully redesigned model of the original rotor. Despite their radically large sizes, it was found that these 25-MW turbine rotors satisfy this limited set of structural design drivers at the rated condition and that larger blade lengths are possible with conewise load-alignment. In addition, flapwise morphing (varying the cone angle with a wind-speed schedule) was investigated to minimize mean and fluctuating blade root bending loads using steady inflow proxies for the maximum and lifetime damage equivalent load moments. Compared to the fixed coned rotor case, morphing can provide an Annual Energy Production (AEP) increase of 6%, and the maximum blade root flapwise bending moment increases 21% (still under the constraint, i.e., 10% of the ultimate moments) as a trade-off. The resulting series of 25-MW rotors can be a valuable baseline for further development and assessment of ultra-large-scale wind turbines.

  PublisherDOI

• Author response for "Parked aeroelastic field rotor response for a 20% scaled demonstrator of a 13‐MW downwind turbine"

  2022-08-24

  peer-reviewSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Performance Testing of APC Electric Fixed-Blade UAV Propellers

  AIAA AVIATION 2022 Forum · 2022-06-20 · 22 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-4020.vid The increase in popularity of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been driven by their use in civilian, education, government, and military applications. However, limited on-board energy storage significantly limits flight time and ultimately usability. The propulsion system plays a critical part in the overall energy consumption of the UAV; therefore, it is necessary to determine the most optimal combination of possible propulsion system components for a given mission profile, i.e., propellers, motors, and electronic speed controllers (ESC). Hundreds of options are available for the different components with little performance specifications available for most of them. APC Thin Electric propellers were identified as the most commonly used type of commercial-off-the-shelf propeller. However, little performance data exist in the open literature for the APC Thin Electric propellers with larger diameters. This paper describes the performance testing of 17 APC Thin Electric 2-bladed, fixed propellers with diameters of 12 to 21 in with various pitch values. The propellers were tested at rotation rates of 1,000 to 7,000 RPM and advancing flows of 8 to 80 ft/s, depending on the propeller and testing equipment limitations. Results are presented for the 17 propellers tested under static and advancing flow conditions with several key observations being discussed. The data produced will be available for download on the UIUC Propeller Data Site and on the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Database.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Field tests of a highly flexible downwind ultralight rotor to mimic a 13-MW turbine rotor

  Journal of Physics Conference Series · 2022-05-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Offshore extreme-scale turbines of 20–25 MW in size may offer reduced energy costs. The technical barriers at these extreme scales include escalating blade masses with increased flexibility as well as high gravity loads and tower-strike issues. These barriers may be addressed with a load-aligning downwind turbine. To investigate this type of design, a field test campaign was conducted with an aeroelastically scaled rotor, termed the Segmented Ultralight Morphing Rotor Demonstrator (SUMR-D). The tests were conducted on the Controls Advanced Research Turbine at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The paper gives an overviewof the experimental diagnostics, blade design, and results of the field campaign, as well as makes conclusions and recommendations regarding extreme-scale highly flexible downwind rotors.

  PublisherDOI

• Author response for "Parked aeroelastic field rotor response for a 20% scaled demonstrator of a 13‐MW downwind turbine"

  2022-10-16

  peer-reviewSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Parked aeroelastic field rotor response for a 20% scaled demonstrator of a 13‐MW downwind turbine

  Wind Energy · 2022-11-29 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Aeroelastic parked testing of a unique downwind two‐bladed subscale rotor was completed to characterize the response of an extreme‐scale 13‐MW turbine in high‐wind parked conditions. A 20% geometric scaling was used resulting in scaled 20‐m‐long blades, whose structural and stiffness properties were designed using aeroelastic scaling to replicate the nondimensional structural aeroelastic deflections and dynamics that would occur for a lightweight, downwind 13‐MW rotor. The subscale rotor was mounted and field tested on the two‐bladed Controls Advanced Research Turbine (CART2) at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's Flatiron Campus (NREL FC). The parked testing of these highly flexible blades included both pitch‐to‐run and pitch‐to‐feather configurations with the blades in the horizontal braked orientation. The collected experimental data includes the unsteady flapwise root bending moments and tip deflections as a function of inflow wind conditions. The bending moments are based on strain gauges located in the root section, whereas the tip deflections are captured by a video camera on the hub of the turbine pointed toward the tip of the blade. The experimental results are compared against computational predictions generated by FAST, a wind turbine simulation software, for the subscale and full‐scale models with consistent unsteady wind fields. FAST reasonably predicted the bending moments and deflections of the experimental data in terms of both the mean and standard deviations. These results demonstrate the efficacy of the first such aeroelastically scaled turbine test and demonstrate that a highly flexible lightweight downwind coned rotor can be designed to withstand extreme loads in parked conditions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Eric Loth

  University of Virginia

  39 shared

• Lucy Y. Pao

  25 shared

• Kathryn Johnson

  Colorado School of Mines

  24 shared

• Daniel Zalkind

  National Renewable Energy Laboratory

  23 shared

• Gavin K. Ananda

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  21 shared

• Meghan Kaminski

  Rivian

  19 shared

• Robert W. Deters

  Embry–Riddle Aeronautical University

  18 shared

• Michael Bragg

  17 shared

Labs

• Combustion, Flow, and Plasma Interaction LaboratoryPI

Awards & honors

• Associate Fellow, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astr…