It looks to me the article addresses this. When windmills are in a
conventional "face to the wind" position, they do need to be well spread out in
order to catch as much wind as possible. But if you rotate the position 90 of
the fans degrees so that they are spinning "sideways", they spin with greater
efficiency when lined up behind each other in zones of lower air resistance.
The article appears to refer to this fan position as a "vertical" rotation.
The photo shows "vertically" rotating tube like structures, which are much like
long fans turned on their sides. Aligning them in fish school formation
evidently is the most efficient in terms of space and maximal wattage
generation. That's how it all appears to me in any event.
Hugh Trenchard
----- Original Message -----
From: Nicholas Thompson
To: Carl Tollander
Cc: Friam@redfish.com
Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2009 9:45 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills
Sorry, everybody. What I meant to write was, "Wait a blithering moment!!!",
suggesting, at least, that the metaphor between bunching up cyclists and
bunching up windturbines was backwards. Don't you WANT your turbines to "feel"
the "headwind"?
Of course I am wrong about this, but I sure would like to understand why.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu)
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe]
----- Original Message -----
From: Carl Tollander
To: nickthomp...@earthlink.net;The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee
Group
Sent: 11/24/2009 10:13:22 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] flocking windmills
What they lack is mobility - lacking some sort of mobile platform maybe
they could get together and decide where the next best placement would be and
tell the manufacturing and installation people. Some sort of distributed
instantiation - Group orders another member, turbine shows up in the mail,
speaks up, says, "I am a wind turbine, the group has determined that it will be
most efficient if you place me over there." And the humans would go do that,
since the turbine family was usually right about such things.
So maybe the turbines "want" some particular configuration, the friction is
just one criteria. If they were a phased array antenna (in addition to being
a group of wind turbines) then they would have additional criteria.
C
Nicholas Thompson wrote:
Now what a blithering moment. Cyclists flock to reduce friction. Ditto
fish, I suppose.
So, turbines want less friction with the wind?????
Something screwy here.
N
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu)
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe]
----- Original Message -----
From: Roger Critchlow
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Sent: 11/24/2009 7:36:30 PM
Subject: [FRIAM] flocking windmills
Same power production as existing wind farms in 100th the land area.
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/1124/1
-- rec --
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
