“When fish swim, they shed tiny vortices in their wake,” says Dabiri. “By schooling together, they can potentially help each other swim by transferring energy between one another through these vortices.”
Applying these same principles, Whittlesey and Dabiri have designed a wind farm. Their farm is set with the turbines closely spaced, so that as each is turned by the wind, it both extracts energy for itself and also helps to direct the flow of wind to the other turbines.
Whittlesey and Dabiri made measurements of turbines designed by a Southern California energy company and fed the data into a computer model designed to optimally space the turbines. Their computations show that the power-per-acre of a wind farm could be increased a hundredfold.
Next, the researchers will construct a test field with real turbines and make actual energy production measurements.
The presentation “Fish schooling as a basis for wind farm design” by Robert Whittlesey and John Dabiri of the California Institute of Technology is scheduled for November 23, 2009 at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society’s (APS) Division of Fluid Dynamics at the Minneapolis Convention Center.
