Hui Hu, professor of aerospace engineering, and his group at Iowa State University studied the effects of the relative rotation directions of two tandem wind turbines on the power production performance, the flow characteristics in the turbine wake flows, and the resultant wind loads acting on the turbines.
The experimental study was performed in a large-scale Aerodynamics/Atmospheric Boundary Layer (AABL) Wind Tunnel available at Aerospace Engineering Department of Iowa State.
It was found that the turbines in counter-rotating would harvest more wind energy from the same oncoming wind, compared with the co-rotating case.
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