Biological Performance Assessment

Abstract

The BioPA provides turbine designers with a set of tools that can be used to assess biological risks of turbines during the design phase, before expensive construction begins. The toolset can also be used to assess existing installations under a variety of operating conditions, supplementing data obtained through expensive field testing. The BioPA uses computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of a turbine design to quantify the exposure of passing fish to a set of known injury mechanisms. By appropriate sampling of the fluid domain, the BioPA assigns exposure probabilities to each mechanism. The exposure probabilities are combined with dose-response data from laboratory stress studies of fish to produce a set of biological BioPA Scores. These metrics provide an objective measure that can be used to compare competing turbines or to refine a new design. The BioPA process can be performed during the turbine design phase and is considerably less expensive than prototype-scale field testing.