When it comes to engineering, nobody beats Mother Nature. This was shown in an advanced design for a windmill turbine (blade) made by Pennsylvania professor, Frank Fish (no, seriously, that's his name). In making a more efficient windmill blade, he definitely thought outside of the box - and thought about the creatures of the sea.
Enter Humpback Whales
Ever wonder why humpback whale fins have little bumps all over the edges? So did biology Professor Frank Fish of West Chester University. He made a model based on the fin and discovered it sliced through the water with less resistance than a similarly sized fin with a smooth edge. Then, re-reasoned, "Wouldn't this make a windmill that turns through the air a lot better?"
And the answer appears to be "Yes".
Like all great scientific discoveries, it just didn't come to Fish in a flash. He'd been pondering the question for 25 years. His branch of biology is called "functional morphology" and his job is to find out why Nature designed Her critters the way that She did.
Part of unraveling this mystery was to study a humpback whale flipper close up. He was allowed to have one from the Marine Mammal Stranding Center in Brigantine, New Jersey. (Sadly, a lot of whales wash up on New Jersey beaches).
He had to use a chainsaw to cut the flipper, weighing in at over 300 pounds, into three pieces to fit it in his car. Then, the flipper pieces had to stay frozen for two years until Fish could find a way to get a cast made of the flipper. (Making a model would be a lot easier - and a lot less smelly - than studying the real thing). After two years, he wound up cutting the flipper into one inch pieces.
With a little help from the US Naval Academy and Duke University, Fish was able to get a prototype windmill made and operational at Prince Edward's Island. Another is to be made by Envira-North Systems, LTD in Ontario. (It's interesting to note that he couldn't find a company in the United States to take a chance.)
What's The Big Deal?
One of the big problems with wind being an energy source was that the windmill often stalled. The smooth-edged blades of the conventional wind turbine are made at a highly steeped angle, to deflect the oncoming wind. Figuring out just how steep this angle should be has been a headache. If you get the angle too steep, you will have a windmill that stalls out a lot.
However, preliminary tests of the bumpy-edged Fish turbine have not been stalling out as much, even when cut at a very steep angle. It's also thought (and hoped) that with a bumpy-edged windmill rather than a conventional smooth-edged blade, only half the number of blades will be needed to generate power.
Even Harvard engineers are impressed. In their journal Physical Review Letters, author and Harvard engineer Ernst A van Nieropp writes that, "There's definitely something going on with these bumps."
In the beloved 1986 film, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, two humpback whales wind up saving the world (with a little help from the Enterprise crew). Perhaps that wasn't just science fiction and whales will, in fact, help us clean up the mess we have made.
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