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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."
And you think that your job blows?
It'll never take off.
324006
AFAIK, wind turbines generate considerable low-frequency noise. Unless this problem is seriously addressed, such a building would be somehow uncomfortable.
Though, wind flowing through a thight agglomeration of skyscrapers generates noise anyway %-)
Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes
Finally a use for all the hot air my PHB produces.....
Oh arse
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.
But what about one of the other problems with turbine generated power? Namely birds being killed by flying through the path of the turbines. Can you imagine sitting at a redlight beside one of these buildings and suddenly having the front half of a pigeon land on your windshield?
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
Hum. Maybe that will finally keep my overclocked system from crashing...
Me! Me! Can I put my ATX Tower open in front of it?
Wind turbines in rural areas are often criticised for detracting from the landscape and for generating noise pollution. Stankovic says noise insulation around the turbines could dampen sound. Traffic in cities would also drown out most of the noise, he suggests.
Engineer 1: Wind power is such a good resource, I wish there was some way for us to tap into it.
Enginner 2: Yeah, but they are loud and ugly and they piss people off. Where can we put them?
Engineer 1: Hmmm, good point. Wait, how about in the middle of a city? They are already ugly and loud, nobody would ever know the difference.
Engineer 2: That's a great idea. We could even incorporate them into the buildings themselves. We'll call it a new paradigm. I've always wanted to use that word.
I believe this would be a great design for a New World Trade Center. It's beautiful, energy efficient and large. Definitely almost looks like the WTC (twin tower type design....). It would also prevent power outages from taking out your whole building. It would be a great way to get people and companies to put offices in these buildings.....advertised free or discounted electricity.
I do not fear working in a tall skyscraper because working in a tall building is not what killed these people. I believe it would be impossible to build something that can take the force of these type of blasts. If you do fear working in these type of buildings, well then the terrorists have already won. They want you to be afraid of them and you need to be strong and show them you are not afraid of them.
Gorkman
You know this proposal's gone the moment GreenPeace realizes what happens to pigeons when they get near this thing...
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
Not to sound troll-like, but my father and stepmother used to live in the building next to the world financial center, near the former WTC towers. They complained, and rightly so, of the venturi effects created by the structures. You could hear the howl of wind using the elevators in their building, yet it was eerily calm on the other side of the towers. So, you're more right than you think.
just my blog and pix
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
Furethermore I believe multiple small fans would be more efficient. Now, IANAAE (I am not an aeronautical engineer) but the total airflow through a large fan's housing is much greater than the amount of airflow that actually pushes the fan (obvious). Many small fans could fill that area more completely and harvest more of the total airflow.
Any thoughts?
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.
Sure you just throw it in to reverse and it will blow the incoming planes off corse!!
This is really interesting - this is the sort of research that makes me happy to hear about. A lot points out the killing of birds, noise etc. but in reality most of these issues are already being addressed in research. Here in Denmark we have some of the largest windmill parks in the world. One just outside the capital Copenhagen is generating 3% of all the energy used by the city.
. dk/news/webcam.htm
But this could be used on low ground as well. I'm doing some parachuting and when landing you always have to stay clear of buildings. A large hangar could easily produce turbulence up to 300 yards away. If this was a set of urban buildings 4-5 stores high, placed in the correct direction, you could actually place the wind turbine in the end, or in a tunnel connected to the end of the building, to move the turbine it-self away to minimize noise. Great potentials...
Birds... well use a grid or net of some sort.
In time (20-100 years from now) we need to be using 100% pure energy, like wind and sun, fission (when it comes) etc... This is not something we can choose not to! We are running out of fossil fuels, and it will be in our lifetime. (At least I plan to live for some years to come).
Copenhagen/Middelgrunden:
http://www.windpower
-:) Oh no - not again.
www.rednebula.com
Why do people think these are going to be loud? Perhaps because people are used to hearing the word "turbines" in the context of jet engines? These are not jet engines. They're not even electric fans. No roar, no hum, not even the whoosh of air. Perhaps an occasional squeak due to bearings that need to be oiled. That's about it.
bp
When I was in college I had a job working as a custodian. Picking up discarded cigarette butts and soda cans outside of the building was bad enough work. I can't even imagine having the job of picking up bird bits from the sidewalk.
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
Government official: Damn, we're paying too much for all this social housing. How can we make more money off of poor people?
Engineer: I know, make them live in power stations.
Deleted
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
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.
Have you ever heard of anything that actually succeeded in reducing the pidgeon population? My suspicion is that pidgeons are the exception to the usual Darwinian theories. No matter how dumb they are or how hard you try to kill them, they just keep breeding and shitting, shitting, shitting.
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.