Dr Oscar Gerardo CASTRO ARDILA (Colombia)

Oscar’s research focuses on a progressive structural damage developed in wind turbine blades called fatigue. He works on the development of fatigue test methods and damage-based fatigue prediction models for wind turbine blades.

PhD in Wind Energy

Current position: Postdoctoral Researcher at Technical University of Denmark, Denmark

Research focus: wind energy

Oscars aim is to contribute to reducing the operational expenses of wind turbine systems by improving the structural performance and lifetime predictability of wind turbine blades.

Oscar works on research projects whose partners include leading European wind energy companies and research centres, such as Siemens Gamesa, Vestas Wind Systems A/S, LM Wind Power A/S, Fraunhofer IWES, and Leibniz University Hannover.

2019 Clubes de Ciencia Colombia
2010 National Programme for Training Young Researchers and Innovators Virginia Gutierrez de Pineda, granted by Administrative Department of Science, Technology and Innovation (Colciencias)
2009 Awarded Claudio Fernandez Riva at the University of Valle, Colombia


CV as submitted for the Green Talents award (2013):

Universidad del Valle, Colombia

Research focus: sustainable use of energy sources

Oscar Castro Ardila started out as an undergraduate, researching Wind Energy. Eventually, he obtained an MSc in Engineering with emphasis on Wind Energy and is now leading his own research group. It seemed unavoidable that such a talented researcher would not catch the ‘sustainability bug’. As he says: “I feel strongly motivated to make use of this opportunity to make contributions to both local and global knowledge on sustainability”.

At only age 27, Oscar Castro Ardila was recently asked to lead his own research group: the Diffusion and Use of Alternative Energy Sources (GDDTA) in Mechanical Engineering at his alma mater, the Universidad Valle in his native Colombia. He believes that in order for sustainability to be advanced, all disciplines should work together: architects, biologists, environmentalists and sociologists. Interestingly, he also prefers to work with sustainability projects that involve not only students but also the national community and regional industry. All of which he managed to combine and include in past projects.

His current GDDTA research group is his most ambitious yet: “We are using hybrid renewable energy systems for power generation, producing renewable biofuels, using photovoltaic electrolysis to obtain potable water and hydrogen, and in the end we are trying to advance the renewable energy potential in rural and urban Colombian zones,” Castro Ardila says.

In the past, Castro Ardila received an award for his BA thesis, graduated summa cum laude, and was part of the ‘National Program for Training Young Researchers and Innovators, Virginia Gutierrez de Pineda’. Currently, he is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Delaware where he is actively involved in the research of high-performance simulations of particle-laden turbulent flows, within the environmental multiphase flows research group.