Wind Energy  FLOWE was established in 2010 to demonstrate fundamental advances in wind energy technology. The primary objective of this research is to achieve significant increases in the power extracted per unit land area of wind farms. This directly translates to reductions in land use and transmission costs for traditional onshore wind energy efforts, while making urban and offshore wind farms a more practical solution in the future. Vertical-axis wind turbines provide the enabling technology for research at FLOWE. Although conventional propeller-type wind turbines (also known as horizontal-axis wind turbines) are the current industry standard, they require significant inter-turbine spacing in order to avoid destructive aerodynamic interference between turbines in a wind farm. Research at FLOWE aims to optimize arrangements of vertical-axis wind turbines in order to avoid destructive aerodynamic interference and, potentially, to achieve constructive interference between adjacent turbines. The net result is significantly higher power extraction from a given wind farm footprint. This site will be periodically updated with progress reports on research at FLOWE (see Publications below). In the meantime, please contact Professor John Dabiri for further information. Research at FLOWE is supported in part by National Science Foundation U.S. Department of Energy (PI: M. Gharib) Windspire Energy, Inc. Publications Limitations of conventional wind energy technology [html] Whittlesey RW, Liska SC, Dabiri JO (2010) “Fish schooling as a basis for vertical-axis wind turbine farm design,” Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, to appear. [html]
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© California Institute of Technology Last Update: April 21, 2010 |
