Schooling fish and their interaction with one another has inspired a Caltech professor to rethink how wind energy can be created.
Head of Caltech’s Biological Propulsion Laboratory John Dabiri and two of his graduate students have turned to schools of fish to further our knowledge of how wind turbines work best and how to combat the lack of space we have for the traditional horizontal-axis wind turbines most commonly seen across the landscape.
“I became inspired by observations of schooling fish, and the suggestion that there is constructive hydrodynamic interference between the wakes of neighboring fish,” said Dabiri, associate professor of aeronautics and bioengineering at Caltech. “It turns out that many of the same physical principles can be applied to the interaction of vertical-axis wind turbines.” (more…)