Christopher Vogel BE(Hons) DPhil FHEA

Christopher graduated with a BE(Hons) and as Senior Scholar in Engineering Science from the University of Auckland in 2011. He then joined the Environmental Fluid Mechanics research group at the University of Oxford, funded by the Oxford Martin School’s Programme on Globalising Tidal Power Generation, completing his DPhil in 2015. He was subsequently a Post-doctoral Research Assistant in the same group and was appointed as a Senior Research Associate in 2017. In 2021, Christopher was awarded his UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, focusing on fluid mechanics challenges associated with scaling up offshore renewable energy to meet the demands of the transition to net-zero.

His research has focussed on the fluid mechanics of offshore renewable energy, principally wind and tidal stream energy, with particular interests in the interfaces between different spatial and temporal scales in these problems, spanning from rotor-scale aerodynamics, to turbine wake evolution, to the aerodynamics of large farms of turbines and interactions with the wind energy resource. Working with colleagues in energy storage, he has also worked on understanding and quantifying wind energy droughts across Great Britain and the impacts that this on medium and long-term energy storage requirements. His group use a range of analytical modelling, computational fluid dynamics simulations, lab-scale experiments, and data science to investigate these problems. 

Christopher has been teaching on the undergraduate Engineering Science course in the department since 2017, and has received departmental gold and silver awards for his teaching. He also teaches tutorials on much of the first and second year of the undergraduate course.

Christopher’s research interests are focussed on fluid-driven renewable energy generation, principally wind and tidal stream energy. Within this, his interests cover a range of scales from rotor-scale flows up to regional-scale modelling, and include:

• Low-speed fluid mechanics
• Numerical modelling of turbines and farms
• Analytical modelling for offshore renewable energy
• Regional-scale impacts of offshore renewable energy generation
• Extreme weather events and their impacts on energy generation

Christopher has taught the first and second year engineering courses in mathematics, statics and dynamics, and fluid and thermodynamics at a range of colleges in Oxford. Within the department, he been a lab demonstrator for the first year Matlab course, second year thermofluids laboratory, third year hydraulics laboratory, and been a teaching assistant for the third year soil mechanics course. He has also been involved with the Headstart and UNIQ engineering outreach programmes for the last few years.

If you're interested in joining the research group, please don't hesitate to get in touch with an outline of your research interests.