Isn't this beautiful:
Story behind it from withouthotair.blogspot.com/2010/01/wind-farm-wakes.
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« IPCC use of non-peer reviewed material? | Main | Rowing and Rugby »
Beautiful
Category: climate economics • climate science
Posted on: January 22, 2010 2:41 PM, by William M. Connolley
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TrackBack URL for this entry: http://scienceblogs.com/mt/pings/130112
Comments
So don't parade-ground them like that. Duh!
Posted by: Vinny Burgoo | January 22, 2010 3:26 PM
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)?
Posted by: Andy Wickert | January 22, 2010 5:25 PM
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
Posted by: Hank Roberts | January 23, 2010 12:17 PM
Current ideas about using the vortexes include:
http://www.asknature.org/strategy/9ce3fb70888cf300f37d90c0c3e8864c
Posted by: Hank Roberts | January 23, 2010 12:21 PM
tampering with nature again . . . how long before this activity is frowned upon?
Posted by: thomas hine | January 25, 2010 10:58 AM