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."

Comments

No good

[BillyGoatThree]

It'll never take off.

what about energy from heat rising?

[NeMon'ess]

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.

A new paradigm

[brain damage]

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.

Not only for high buildings.

[Saggi]

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.

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. dk/news/webcam.htm

Re:Efficiency of 1 large fan vs many small fans

[DJerman]

Multiple fans mean multiple inspections & failures. An array of 100 3-meter fans would probably cause more problems than one well-maintained 30 meter fan, and cost more than a nuclear pile in the basement :-).

w/r/t the spillage problem, you could do this more simply with one large multivaned turbine.

The problem is that a design that maximizes use of the airflow means more minimum drag (when the fans are feathered to spill air). If you're too efficient you make a sail that drags your building s over.

Re:brings new meaning to old cliches...

[lizrd]

Speaking of "the shit just hit the fan", what is thins going do to urban pidgeon populations? Them damned things make enough of a mess without being chopped into pieces and spread across the city by giant fan blades. Bird bisection is a well known problem in the case of rural turbine installations, but the carcasses are generally eaten by foxes and other small carnivores. In an urban setting the mess created could become a significant problem.

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.