Jellyfish, Fish, Windmills, Bats, Birds

The biggest challenge is that the individual turbines are very efficient in terms of how well they’re able to convert the motion of the wind into electricity. The challenge is that downwind of each of those turbines, they create a lot of choppy air or turbulence.

So that choppy air behind the wind turbine we call a wake. The fish create these wakes as well. They swim in groups, and they don’t spread out as far apart as possible. But instead they coordinate their positions, one with the other. In fact, they can take advantage of the flow that’s created. So that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Meaning that group of fish can swim more efficiently together than they would separated from one another.

One of the key features of those models are these vortices that we’ve been talking about so far. The swirling currents that the fish would create. The mathematical model for one of those vortices is almost identical to how you would represent what are called vertical axis wind turbines.

(27:52) Let’s say I give you, Steve, 10 acres and I say I want you to generate as much electricity as you can using the conventional wind turbines. For the propeller-style ones, you could probably only fit one of those turbines on that plot of land. For these smaller vertical axis wind turbines, it turns out on pencil-and-paper calculation, you could get 10 times more energy out of the same plot of land by taking advantage of these effects.

(28:54) And so we put a set of these turbines out in that field. We got up to about two dozen of them, in fact, at our field site. And we were able to show in the real world that in fact, you could get 10 times more energy out of a plot of land using this fish-inspired type of design.

(30:17) But one that even is more significant is the potentially lower impact on birds and bats, which is, for the large turbines an ongoing challenge, the potential for birds to run into the blades, or bats and other areas. These vertical axis wind turbines, they’re lower, as you said to the ground, but they also have a different visual signature. So, frankly, in the large turbine cases, a bird can simply not see the blade before it’s too late. In the case of these vertical axis wind turbines, the visual signature is much more apparent, because the blades move more slowly than they do for those large turbines.

What Can Jellyfish Teach Us About Fluid Dynamics?