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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'll never take off.
324006
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
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'
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.
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?
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
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.