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Living Inside A Giant Wind Turbine
A reader writes: "New Scientist has an article about buildings that incorporate numerous wind turbines. These neat office blocks can generate much of the own energy and the design of the building actually makes them more power efficient that regular turbines."
It seems it would only really be workable with really big buildings. In light of recent events how many people are going to be happy working in tall buildings?
As a side affect, you might get cheap air conditioning. No more worries about hot stuffy offices. Probably no more "sick building" problems either.
******
"What makes you think I care about your opinions?"
What happens during tornado/hurricane/santa-ana-style winds? Sure, they can turn the props off (although won't they break?) but what about the shape of the building "focussing" the wind down near the ground?
324006
So they say the street noise would make the noise of the generators less of a problem. But they also want to build these into apartment buildings - where during the night at least, people will want things to be quiet. Do they turn them off in the night?
I am also wondering about the output of these things. Since they can't be turned to face the wind, I guess you can only use them where you have a more or less steady wind in one main direction. I am not sure this is really useful in many places. And then, you need a lot of free space around such a building, otherwise you won't get a lot of wind into the propellers in the first place. So I'm not really sure if this is such a hot idea.
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
As far as this article is concerned, I don't see this design going into the replacement for the WTC. Buildings today are carefully designed to obstruct as little wind as possible. Having giant turbines between two buildings over an avenue would place massive forces on the buildings. It's hard enough designing skyscrapers, I doubt the designers are keen to add extra force to compensate for.
This is an excellent idea; office blocks have to be some of the most power hungry buildings there are, and this could really cut down on energy/natural resource usage, pollution etc.
I would have to imagine that even once maintenance is taken care of, the energy savings this could make would quickly pay for the initial setup cost.
My only concern is the noise - the article suggests that noise may be damped by insulation, however given that rural turbines are criticised for noise pollution, I suspect that the effect of sound insulation is still not going to be enough to make it a pleasant working environment. When the small fridge in the corner of our office starts whirring occasionally (solved by a swift kick) that tiny noise soon becomes irritating. Imagine even a supposedly acceptable but constant hum all day, every day. This could really have a bad effect on the nerves of workers inside the building.
Several problems with this idea:
1) Take the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, they have a skybridge between them that has to be flexible since the towers move independently. The wind turbines would have to do the same on their buildings.
2) Traffic would not "drown out" the noise. The sound of the turbines would simply add to the overall noise of the city. Especially inside the buildings.
I still think its a great idea to use various means of generating electricity rather than relying on a few huge sources though!
We all know that buildings sway a lot (several feet at the top). We also all know that electricity can be generated by piezoelectric strips that bend. Has anyone tried running a long piezoelectric strip up a building?
I know they were able to generate electricity from the rising and falling of waves by using piezoelectrics, maybe the same idea would work here.
Travis
Don't know where they got this statement from:
turbines have a dramtic colling effect on the structure.
This is not true. The turbines would actuall warm the structure. The turbines could only cool the structure if they were self-propelled by some fuel, but the turbines actually slow do the wind. In fact for maximum thermo-dynamic power transfer, the wind flowing through would be losing at least 50% of its umph....
The above statement leads be to believe that nobody is really taking this seriously.
The problem with building something as tall as the WTC is that the buildings have to be made flexible because of wind, etc. In other words, there are trade offs between strength against impact and flexibility.
What was that bull about it possibly being more difficult to have such a structure built due to the cost of having to have precise curve? I see strangely shaped building all over the place that are that way for nothing more than aesthetics (sp?). Straight, curved, pyramid or just plain weird, would you want to work in a building that was not laid out precisely? Aren't the tallest buildings in the world (in Singapore?) round, and don't they have a crosswalk that vaguely resembles the cross-struts in the articles concept picture?
Not only do I see this as an excellent idea, but if I owned the Sears Towers in Chicago I would investigate the possibility of such an addition (to provide crosswalks AND power).
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
1. Fluid Losses - these are the same as pressure loss in a pipe or through an orifice, like a showerhead. Losses occur mainly near the boundary of the channel (i.e. the rim of the pipe / vent), and several small fans would have far more rim area than one single large fan. This would reduce the total air flow passing throught the generator, as well as the energy obtained (losses = friction = heat transferred to the vents, rather than kinetic energy transferred to the vanes of the turbines).
2. Mechanical friction in several small fans vs. a single large fan. I would suspect that it would be easier and more effective to maintain good running order of a large-scale lubrication system for a single fan than for several small fans. Over time, and a large number of fans, the losses from friction would rob energy and the cost of maintenance could be prohibitive.
Now, this is really only hand-waving - it's been about 5 years since I took fluid mechanics, and about the same since various other physics, but these strike me as significant when looking at large-scale power generation.
Ed Barsalou
Disclaimer: I've forgotten most of my real engineering education.
These types of buildings are not uncommon in NYC, I know of abot a half dozen. Ever seen Superman 3?
The construction costs are not particularly high, as the arch of the building (even inverted) allows greater flexibility and strength on the curved side.
Really, conservation of energy supports the idea of the turbine cooling the building. Or at least the air passing thru the turbine. The turbine is outputting energy in the form of electricity. Where did that energy come from? Primarily the kinetic energy of the wind. Since heat is pretty much a specialized type of kinetic energy, it's not hard to imagine that the turbine would extract some amount of heat from the air.
I'm not an expert in the field, and I can imagine the opposite happening too. The turbine would take kinetic energy out of the air and convert it to both heat in the air and energy in the turbine. But neither case would violate the conservation of energy.
We used to build giant wind turbines (read big windmills) for electricity until we sold off that business in the late 80s, I believe to a Swedish company. There was a case where we had a very large turbine(believe it was one of the largest in the world at the time) set up in the midwest. One day, an old ladies house just all of a sudden collapsed. This house was on a hill something like 5 miles away, and it was strucurally fine. As it turned out, the natural sound waves that were produces by the slow spinning blades happened to be just the right frequency to cause the house to collapse. Who would have thunk? Obviously, no one.
The moral of the story is nothing is free and totally clean. Everything has a side effect. It wouldn't be such a good thing to place one of these in a city and then 6 months later have a dozen buildings 5 miles away go toppling down. The idea is great, but that doesn't mean its the right thing to do.