Ripping Off Mother Nature For Design Tips Nets Better Wind Turbines
March 5, 2008 · Print This Article
Biomimicry is the new hotness. Nature has done a pretty damn good job of figuring out the right way to design for efficiency and it’s the smart designer who can pull out those lesson to apply to their work. Wind turbines are now getting the whale flipper treatment. It turns out that the bumps on the edge of a whale’s flippers make it a more efficient paddler. When those bumps are added to wind turbines they are 20% more efficient at moving air and have 32% less drag. Those are huge numbers in efficiency jumps. When you have a wind farm that makes hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars a year, even a 10% jump in output adds up a lot of extra bottom line.
Smart green design is going to make a whole lotta folks a whole lotta money.
Link [Ecogeek]
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Computer scientists have been working on evolutionary engineering for a while now. Basically have a system that tries a bunch of different possible solutions to a problem, and add some positive and negative feedback to the results, add slight random variation, repeat. They came up with some very interesting, non-intuitive antennae designs, for example.
Drawing ideas from nature is a fantastic shortcut to the same strategy (or is it vice versa?).