Wind turbines are the Colossus of the modern landscape, their blades sweeping circles more than a football field in diameter. Critics call them unsightly and say that the rotating blades clobber unsuspecting birds.
John Dabiri of Caltech found a solution underwater. He built an experimental wind farm — the Caltech Field Laboratory for Optimized Wind Energy (FLOWE) — in which the location of turbines relative to each other takes advantage of the air flow among them.
Technical application:
Bionic application:
Further description:
http://dabiri.caltech.edu/research/wind-energy.html
http://dabiri.caltech.edu/publications/FLOWE_APSDFD_Nov2011.pdf
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Picture-sources:
http://www.greenwoodguides.com/south-africa/blog/post.aspx?ref=10