Estudiante

From Whales to Fans
A second look at a piece of sculpture led to a promising technology.
By Alan S. Brown, Associate Editor
This is a story about a man named Fish who noticed something unusual about whale flippers and who, after nearly 30 years, turned it into a technology platform.

Frank Fish and a partner, Stephen Dewar, founded a company named Whale Power to market the technology,which takes its inspiration from the natural design of the bumps, or tubercles, on humpback whale flippers. According to Dewar, applying to airfoils what Fish and others learned from whales improves lift without increasing drag. He said that 24-foot-diameter fans based on tubercle technology use half the number of blades and move 25 percent more air and consume 25 percent less power than fans withconventional blades turning at the same speed. Whale-inspired fans are already available, and wind and tidal power blades could be next.
Humpback whale breach. Frederick Sound, Alaska
As startling as Dewar’s claims sound, the story of how the fans reached commercialization is far more surprising.

It began when Fish was earning a graduate degree in zoology in the 1970s. At the time, manyresearchers were interested in the biology and behavior of swimming animals. Fish, on the other hand, studied how organisms manipulate flows to swim or fly. With his professors, he investigated everything from fish dynamics to how muskrats created vortices with their tails. (Understanding vortices would prove important later.)

While at Michigan State University, Fish studied with Rollin Baker, thezoologist who directed the school’s museum. Baker would review nature pictures from artists and comment on their accuracy. He might, for example, point out that the fox in the snow had no footprints or that a colorful bird had the wrong plumage for fall.

“I learned to look at artists’ interpretation of nature with the eye of a biologist and see what facts they missed,” Fish recounted. (This wouldalso prove important.)

Shortly after he received his Ph.D. in zoology, Fish and the woman he would eventually marry were in Boston. When their planned canoe trip was rained out, they went to Quincy Market and wandered into a store of animal sculptures.
Above: Model of a humpback whale flipper. Anyone who studied aerodynamics would assume bumps go on the trailing, not leading, edge.

On apedestal in the center of the room was a sculpture of a humpback whale. Fish walked up and started laughing. The store manager wanted to know what was so funny. “The artist got it wrong,” said Fish, who knew a thing or two about critiquing artwork. “The bumps are on the leading edge of flippers, and that’s not the way it’s supposed to go.”

“No, no,” she insisted. “This artist is very careful.”She pulled out a brochure with a picture of a whale breaching. Sure enough, the tubercles were on the front, not the rear, of the flippers.

“This went against everything I had been taught,” Fish recalled. “When you ride on an airplane, you don’t see bumps on the leading edge of the wing.” He wondered why he did not see a flat surface that would produce smooth, aerodynamic flow.
Left: Flippermodels with and without leading edge bumps. Wind tunnel tests showed that the bumps improved lift and delayed stall at low speeds. Fish resolved to get hold of a whale, and there is a mechanism to do just that. Fish called friends at the Smithsonian Institution, who put his name on the marine mammals stranding list.

That is where this story stalled for nearly 10 years. Meanwhile, Fish built hisreputation as an expert in the biomechanics of swimming. One day he walked into his lab and a student said, “Someone called for you about a dead whale in New Jersey.”

He dialed and a woman told him that a dead whale had beached. He could pick up the flippers, but the animal was rotting so he had to do it fast. She estimated that the whale was 20 feet long. Since flippers are usually...