Bio-inspired morphing blades for wind and tidal turbines

空气和水生生物已经开发出多种方法来优化它们所居住的流体中的运动，采用形状适应性的物体一直是缓解风和水流不稳定性质造成的负荷的一种解决方案。在相同的运行环境下，风力涡轮机和潮汐涡轮机也会受到相同流量波动的影响，这会影响从流体中提取的功率，并由于额外的负载而缩短设备的潜在寿命。继通过在涡轮机叶片中安装柔性部件来减少潮汐涡轮机负荷的成功示范之后，该项目旨在进一步研究和开发被动自适应叶片的概念，以便在潮汐和风力发电设备中潜在地使用。

Airborne and aquatic lifeforms have developed numerous ways of optimising movement in the fluids they inhabit, with adopting shape-adaptive bodies has been one solution to mitigating loads caused by unsteady nature of winds and water currents. Sharing the same operating environments wind and tidal turbines are also subject to the same flow fluctuations which affect the amount of power extractable from the fluid and reduce potential lifetimes of devices due to extra loading. Following successful demonstrations of reducing tidal turbine loads by implementing flexible components in turbine blades this project aims to further investigate and develop the concept of passively-adaptive blades for potential use in tidal and wind power devices.