Wind Farm Efficiency to be Improved Using “Evolutionary Algorithms”

May 9th, 2011 by Zachary Shahan

Evolution inspires. And it has inspired some computer science researchers from the University of Adelaide and MIT to find out how to better place wind turbines in order to maximize their productivity.

“Senior Lecturer Dr Frank Neumann, from the School of Computer Science, is using a ‘selection of the fittest’ step-by-step approach called ‘evolutionary algorithms’ to optimise wind turbine placement,” the University of Adelaide reports. “This takes into account wake effects, the minimum amount of land needed, wind factors and the complex aerodynamics of wind turbines.”

While larger and larger turbines are being built to maximize efficiency and production, and thus lower costs, the placement of wind turbines apparently hasn’t been perfected yet and offers another way to increase productivity/efficiency and reduce costs. Hopefully, this work from Neumann and his colleagues will bring us forward a stride or two.

The placement of wind turbines to achieve maximum efficiency is a highly complex matter, though, Neumann notes. And some patience is in order (sorry). “An evolutionary algorithm is a mathematical process where potential solutions keep being improved a step at a time until the optimum is reached,” he says.

“You can think of it like parents producing a number of offspring, each with differing characteristics…. As with evolution, each population or ‘set of solutions’ from a new generation should get better. These solutions can be evaluated in parallel to speed up the computation.” Interesting way to look at it.

Neumann went to the University of Adelaide after working in Germany at the Max Planck Institute. He is working on this wind turbine placement project in coordination with researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

h/t TreeHugger

About the Author

Zachary Shahan spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as the director/chief editor. Otherwise, he's probably enthusiastically fulfilling his duties as the director/editor of Solar Love, EV Obsession, Planetsave, or Bikocity. Zach is recognized globally as a solar energy, electric car, and wind energy expert. If you would like him to speak at a related conference or event, connect with him via social media. You can connect with Zach on any popular social networking site you like. Links to all of his main social media profiles are on ZacharyShahan.com.

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Problem is we need good engineering not academics and people who write books, the problems and answers are very simple and comon sense.
windmills, no wind no power production.
solar, no sun, non power production.
however academics who run the DOE give academics who have no comon sense billions in grants to research, what is comon knowledge to engineers.
or your average bicycal mechanic.and we wonder why the USA is so far behind third world countries. we need to get the academics, book writers and polititions out of US technology otherwise we will be still spending billions on academics to come up with new technology for dinosaur windmills 20 years from now.