A team of aeronautical enginneers and bio-engineers at CalTech created a “wind turbine farm design” with an alternative orientation. Traditionally, turbines rotate on a horizontal axis; however, Robert Whittlesey, Sebastian Liska, and John O Dabiri were inspired by the mesmerizing geometric arrangement of shed vortices in the wake of schooling fish. They applied this arrangement to wind turbine design, with vertical instead of horizontal orientation of the turbines, and found that the vertical axis wind turbines yielded much higher power outputs for a given area of land. These Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWTs) of the Wind Farm Design are shown to significantly increase the array performance coefficent, increasing the power output of one order of magnitude for given area of land compared to turbines with a horizontal axes.
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