Properly placed wind turbines can generate more energy.
South Australia’s University of Adelaide computer science research succeeded to understand where best these wind turbines may be placed to increase wind power.
Senior lecturer Dr Frank Neumann from the School of Computer Science has developed a step-by-step approach called “evolutionary algorithms”.
Dr Neumann has come to the University of Adelaide this year from Germany where he worked at the Max Planck Institute and now is working on wind turbine placement optimization in collaboration with researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Renewable energy is playing an increasing role in the supply of energy worldwide and will help mitigate climate change,” says Dr Neumann.
Factors that will influence this development are size of land, wake effects, wind as a whole, wind turbines – their aerodynamics and the resulting complexities of the same.
According to Dr Neumann current approaches to solving this placement optimization can only deal with a small number of turbines.