Making Wind Viable: How To Reduce Power Losses Of Downstream Turbines
Wind energy is getting a lot of attention and a lot of money - it just isn't generating a lot of electricity yet, no matter what gets claimed in rosy projections. In the real world, they do quite poorly and building more of them doesn't fix it. Dr. Hui Hu and his group at Iowa State University want to solve a puzzle that has stumped scientists and engineers for hundreds of years; how to make wind work. Using a large-scale Aerodynamics/Atmospheric Boundary Layer (AABL) Wind Tunnel at Iowa State University, they studied the effects of the relative rotation directions of two tandem wind turbines on the power production performance, the flow characteristics in the turbine wake flows, and the resultant wind loads acting on the turbines. read more