Beautiful

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So don't parade-ground them like that. Duh!

By Vinny Burgoo (not verified) on 22 Jan 2010 #permalink

Beautiful - yes! As are the physics. It seems that one could rather simply figure out the locations of the pressure shadows and vortices shed during particular wind conditions (especially with the help of the fantastic experiment illustrated here) and plan better in the future.

As a side note on beauty in fluids: the educated audience here may all be familiar with this one (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Vortex-street-1.jpg), but how about this one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Airplane_vortex_edit.jpg)?

By Andy Wickert (not verified) on 22 Jan 2010 #permalink

Yeah, but if they were _really_ efficient at capturing energy out of the air, there would be carbon dioxide snow flurries and liquid oxygen and nitrogen rain behind the turbines, not just a little water vapor fog.

The actual paper is interesting; the picture is of the worst case, wind directly in line.

But I wonder if they could map the vortices coming off those things to use them -- think how geese fly in a 'V' -- trading off the difficult point position-- all the rest picking up energy from the vortexes.
http://www.google.com/search?q=energy+transfer+wing+feather+vortex

I'd bet in a decade a wind generator will look more like a bird's wing, an array of 'feathers' flexing and transferring that motion into useful electricity, with something like this:
http://news.google.com/news?q=piezoelectric magnitude

tampering with nature again . . . how long before this activity is frowned upon?

By thomas hine (not verified) on 25 Jan 2010 #permalink