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I have worked upon a project that estimates the wind power generation potential in India using simulation techniques and polynomial regression. I have written the first draft. However, everyone in my college told me that they can't review these domains as they have no knowledge about them.
From where can I get feedback on this preprint? Can anyone reading this suggest me how to improve this?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Link to the article
Try to get someone who can give you general feedback, even if not an expert in the field (is the paper logical, easy to read, well written, etc.)
Also, where is this publication aimed? What journal? My quick take is a lower level "energy resources" type journal.
My quick reactions:
English is good (better than many science papers from East Asians).
Paper is readable, not contorted by academese. (This is helpful in general but especially if you have a multidisciplinary topic or something with public policy implications.) That said, you should tighten up some things like the "and so on".
I would not use an angled pie chart. It screams novice PowerPoint user trying to look cool. Use a flat pie chart instead.
In addition, this is not vital, but I would urge to try to organize the chart better. For instance use different shades of blue or grey for the fossil fuels. Shades of green for renewable (and if you can split to biomass, hydro, and WIND) that would be good. I guess you can leave nuclear since it is not really renewable or fossil fuel. Maybe yellow or lavender or red or black (like the radioactive colors). Think about how you organize the slices also. Probably the fossil fuel first (clockwise), with the slices in size order. Have renewables last, with slices in size order (maybe emphasize wind with a bold, perhaps). Nuclear can be in between the two. It is sort of in between the two in concept anyways (extraction based so not renewable but very long lived with waste reprocessing). Also zero carbon but some other non-green aspects. This is not necessary. But just nice for graphs to be easily read to extract info (not scanning each sector with eye darting all over page).
I doubt the 24% renewables. Too high. Check some other sources, please.
Add a graphic (and discussion) in the intro showing rate of growth of Indian electrical demand. I was under the impression that population has been growing and also country being electrified. You want a graphic with some decent time scope. Maybe 1950 to 2050. Check the Shell and BP yearly energy documents (there may even be one). Failing that, I bet there is some India specific study that has this. Want to show "been growing a lot". Expected to grow more.
The resource exhaustion graph (figure 2) is laughable (sorry). Predicting fossil fuel exhaustion is very difficult because we find more and get better tools to extract it. Actually predicting peak coal/gas/oil is very difficult. Your graph is way too pessimistic. See the history of the R/P ratio for instance. We are at about 50 years right now and it has actually grown since the 1970s (pure exhaustion would mean we had already run out, but we actually have more reserves now than we did before, even more reserves versus annual demand).
These issues in the introduction are not critical to your paper (which is on estimating wind potential in India). But if you put stuff out that is wrong, it is distracting. I would edit the length down (for a publication, but OK for a thesis). But in any case, tighten up the logic.
I don't know much CFD or other computer simulation so I can't comment much on them. (I won't have even detected obvious issues because I just didn't weed through it.) Get a general MechE or computer science person to look at it.
Also consider having an economist (or resource economist) look at the simulations. Not for the economics per se but just the logic of the modeling. They do a lot of modeling and can opine on your overall approach and communication. Then have them look at the whole paper. They are probably more the audience than CFD crowd.
Towards the beginning of the technical (2) section, you talk about 'setting up a turbine'. Reads like you physically built a turbine or test device. Do you mean simulated?
Consider to add a block diagram for the sections of the project. It's not that complicated and your explanation goes through it OK. But it will just help guide the reader.
There seems to be something "off" in your conclusions and intro. I thought we were going to get an overall estimate of wind production for India but it seems like it is restricted to one area. And I don't readily see how you extrapolate that to country-wide results (considering wind variation and land use availability). I suspect this would be a much bigger project than you planned. But just make it clear to the reader that you're not delivering that. Confused me. You can still use some of the country-wide needs and have some final comments on implications. As motivation. But make it a little bit more clear, you have a much smaller scope.
The conclusion seems a little too strong to me. I would water it down a bit. You haven't really done a full country study so I don't see how you can much such a strong stance. I would make the conclusion more about the method ("CFD can be used to model windmill potential" or the like).
Maybe say "Initial indications from this study suggest that wind power can grow in India but will be challenged to supply the countries large electrical needs. However, a deeper study, including economics, land use issues, and wind variation by locations would be required to quantify how much wind can help."
[Even this may be too strong. Might be wiser to just say "expanded use of CFD similuations can be a valuable part of a multidisciplinary effort to truly determine the medium term potential for wind power in India. Such an effort would need to also incorporate added wind data, land use availability and input on economics and regulations, as well as compatibility with the Indian power grid.]
