Schooling fish inspire efficient wind farmsSchooling fish inspire efficient wind farms
Designs rely on individuals capturing energy to operate more efficiently
By Jessica Marshall
updated 2:36 p.m. ET, Mon., Nov . 30, 2009
The patterns that schooling fish form to save energy while swimming have inspired a new wind farm design that researchers say will increase the amount of power produced per acre by at least tenfold.
"For the fish, they are trying to minimize the energy that they consume to swim from Point A to Point B," said John Dabiri of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who led the study. "In our case, we're looking at the opposite problem: How to we maximize the amount of energy that we collect?"
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Like the fish, these spinning turbines generate a swirling wake. The energy in this flow can be gathered by neighboring turbines if they are placed close enough together and in the right position. By capturing this wake, two turbines close together can generate more power than each acting alone.
This contrasts with common, pinwheel-style wind turbines where the wake from one interferes with its neighbors, reducing the neighbors' efficiency. The vortexes occur in the wrong orientation for the neighboring turbines to capture them.
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"If we just mimic the fish wake, we can do pretty well," Dabiri said. "But, as engineers, maybe we're smarter than fish. It turns out that for this application there is even better performance to be had."