In order to reach maximum efficiency, windmills must be spaced far apart. This allows each rotor to capture ‘clean’ air moving across its blades. Unfortunately, arranging windmills for high efficiency means that wind farms must occupy a fairly large patch of land.
Professor John Dabiri, Center for Bioinspired Engineering, Caltech
Prof. John Dabiri, Center for Bioinspired Engineering, Caltech, may have found another way. After noticing that schools of fish can often swim more efficiently than individual fish, he set out to find out why. The results led him to a new design for wind farms: relatively small vertical axis turbines mounted in tight clusters. These turbines can do something that standard airplane-like rotors cannot: efficiently convert ‘dirty’ air vortices generated by neighboring turbines into energy. Read more in the March/April 2013 issue of Sierra magazine.
