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Living Inside A Giant Wind Turbine

Posted by Hemos on from the new-and-interesting-ideas dept.

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."

8 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. What about high winds? by BillyGoatThree · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

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    324006
    1. Re:What about high winds? by Lumpy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      wind turbine systems have 2 modes of "off" as you speak.

      A breaking system that locks it in place or a gear system that rotates the blades to 90Deg angle to the wind causing them to not even want to rotate, then engage the breaking system. even the small residential systems have these. My regeerative windmill (uses 100V line voltage to excite the field) trop the blades to nuetral and engages a brake when house current drops to eliminate backfeeds and ensure safety.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  2. Noise and Density by ghoti · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  3. what about energy from heat rising? by NeMon'ess · · Score: 5, Interesting
    In nearly every multistory building today, ventilator systems have to keep the higher floors from getting too warm because heat rises. A system should be designed to take the warm air from all the floors and pass it through turbines before it exits the roof. I'm sure it would not be as efficient as what this article suggests, placing turbines into the exterior of the structure, but it would save some electricity costs.

    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.

  4. Another idea by Kallahar · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

  5. Re:Cooling effect..... Not by snatchitup · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  6. Cost of curves? by Shotgun · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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).

    --
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    Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
  7. Bad analogy by BeBoxer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.