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May 18, 2007
Biomimicry designed windmill blades
A seemingly simple alteration a wind turbine blade's traditional shape could result in huge improvements in efficiency.WhalePower Corporation out of Toronto, Canada has designed a turbine blade with rounded, teeth-like bumps along the leading edge. The company's name is a nod to the humpback whale, whose flipper was the inspiration for the design.
The agility of the humpback whale is astonishing, given that they can be over 50 feet long, weigh nearly 80,000 pounds, yet move quickly and tightly in the water. One of the animal's advantages, according to scientists, is the unique row of bumps or "tubercles" along the leading edge of their flippers that dramatically increase the whale's aerodynamic efficiency. Specifically, researchers found a 32 percent lower drag and 8 percent improvement in lift from a flipper with a serrated edge compared to a smooth one.
I'm baffled time and again by the power that exists in nature to solve so many of our issues that our technology seems to saddle us with. For all of our years of wind tunnel testing and computer aided design, the solution to our problems are sitting out in the ocean on the flipper of a humpback whale. Really makes you stop and think...What if we'd let them be hunted to extinction? Where would we be with this technology then? This technology works on any fin like structure, so it improves our hydro-electric dams, prop driven air planes, the freaking ceiling fans in your living room, the list goes on and on. Biomimicry gives us a starting point for our engineering that will allow us to revolutionize the way we build things. Nature has provided us a road map for how we should build things and if we have the good sense to follow it we all stand to benefit massively from the very biodiversity that we are destroying.
Read more over at Green Options.
Posted by Jamison at May 18, 2007 11:04 AM
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