VOLUME 22 #1

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DEPARTMENTS

Turbines need their space

RESEARCH | Research into the best ways to arrange wind turbines has produced staggering results—quite literally.

Cristina Archer and her Atmosphere and Energy Research Group at UD have found that spacing out turbines in an offshore wind farm can improve performance by as much as 33 percent.

“Staggering every other row was amazingly efficient,” says Archer, associate professor of physical ocean science and engineering and of geography, whose findings were published in Geophysical Research Letters.

The researchers used an offshore wind farm near Sweden as the basis for their study, using computer simulations to compare the existing tightly packed, grid-like layout with six alternative configurations.