A crazy Fall schedule that included a fair bit of travel has me behind on posting to the website, but the Thanksgiving holiday is an appropriate time for a post about Nils Horneff. Nils joined Water Bros Desal in April as an engineering research assistant from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Karlsruhe, Germany. He came with a strong background in numerical modeling that we wanted to leverage to improve the rigor of our wave energy converter (WEC) modeling.
Within a couple of weeks of his arrival, we had him helping craft responses to reviewer queries on our proposal to the Department of Energy for a 4-year project to do long-duration testing of a ruggedized version of our Waves to Water design. Beyond the WEC modeling work, Nils was also great a disseminating our work through technical conferences like the Appalachian Energy Summit in Boone, NC and the University Marine Energy Research Community conference in Durham, New Hampshire. I even had him pop in as a fresh set of eyes and technical consultant on my North Carolina Renewable Ocean Energy Program projects.
Landon and I are thankful for the technical contributions that Nils made and the friendships that developed before Nils returned to Germany in the middle of October.
