VATIS UPDATE Article

Anna Craig, a mechanical engineering doctoral candidate at Stanford University, the United States, and her research team recently studied modeling VAWT array arrangements. While a single VAWT is not as en-ergy-producing as an individual HAWT, the wind flow synergies created in a closely-spaced array of VAWTs can potentially generate up to 10 times more power per unit of land area than an array of widely-spaced HAWTs.

“For the vertical axis wind turbines, what you get, especially as you place them in close transverse proximity to each other, is that they can actually interact positively,” said Craig. Researchers agree that there is more research to be done on VAWTs before they can be deployed at an energy sector scale. However, they provided significant insights into one central VAWT challenge on how to research, test and develop insights for effective array arrangements.

They did this in a lab experiment because field testing is currently very expensive, and computer simulations are not yet refined enough or are too computationally expensive.

Researchers believe that this lab experiment and similar follow-ups offer important possibilities both for in-field arrangements and refining numerical simulations. They conducted the experiment in the large water flume with the system’s water flow effectively representing the wind flow.