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Vertical Axis Wind Turbine With Push and Pull
Sterling D. Allan writes "After 10 years of prototyping, wind tunnel testing, patenting, and tweaking, Ron Taylor of Cheyenne (windy) Wyoming is ready to take his vertical axis wind turbine into commercial production. Design creates pull on the back side contributing to 40%+ wind conversion efficiencies. Because it spins at wind speed, it doesn't kill birds, and it runs more quietly. It also doesn't need to be installed as high, and it can withstand significantly higher winds (can generate in winds up to 70 mph, compared to ~54 mph tops for propeller designs). Generating costs estimated at 2.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, putting it in the lead pocket-book-wise not just of wind and solar, but of conventional power as well. Production prototype completion expected in 5-7 months."
Well blow me down!
Better is the enemy of good enough. - Russian proverb.
...but I don't take anything "Open Source Energy News" posts seriously anymore. It seems like every post that comes from them is a crackpot.
I think that if a bird gets caught in there, he can still be killed easily?
This is the sig that says NI (again)
While vertical axis wind generators aren't new - the Soviets utilized vertical designs for the most part - this design is. Wind power usually isn't practical or environmental for large-scale deployment (land usage/kW is too high), and I expect this design won't change that, but it could make wind an even better choice for microgrids.
Shame the article reads like Yet Another Slashvertisment (someone wants venture capital I guess) - I'd like some more details.
Birds don't move at wind speed. Sounds like a recipe for a collision!
Another obvious advantage of this design is that unlike a propeller, you don't have to turn them around when the direction of the wind changes...
A couple of years ago I talked with an engineer friend about this when we got on the subject of alternative energy. This isn't a new idea of course, variations have been used above chimneys for a long time for instance. He told me then about the large number of advantages to this design. I don't remember if I asked him the question that pops up in my head now - why did the propeller design become the norm?
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Ron Taylor of Cheyenne (windy) Wyoming is ready to take his vertical axis wind turbine into commercial production......Production prototype completion expected in 5-7 months.
Now being the old fuddy duddy I am (at the tender age of 21) I'm obviously using an old and outdated definition for "ready for commercial production." See, the definition I'm using is one where the prototyping stage is over, and these things are being made in some factory and are about to be sold to companies/people. Now obviously not being up-to-date with the latest definitions, I was quite excited when I read it was ready, only to have my hopes dashed by the end of the summary.
Why don't you call us old-timers when you actually have a commercial product?
No, this guy is not full of hot air. He's not all bluster.
The technology does blow everything else away.
Yes, it will succeed, and not just in vertical markets.
It really took some gust to work on this.
----
Now I have to go back to bed in a fit of self-loathing.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
The result is that the turbine spins just slightly faster than the wind speed -- 1/100ths faster on average, beginning with winds of about 5 miles per hour.
How does that work? Doesn't that break some sort of physics law? No really, I am asking. I have no clue.. It just seems counter intuative to me.
From: http://www.windside.com/
"Windside works, when others don't, with gentle summer breeze and in a violent winter storm. It works, when others are in deep frost. Windside produces electricity at least 50 % more in a year than traditional propeller models. All the year round. Many things make it extraordinary. And therefore it gives the best value for the money."
Not sure what the differences might be. Winside apparently has been producing these vertical axis windmills for extreme environments for, they say, about twenty years. But they do seem costly. They use a helix type design for the blades, see: http://www.windside.com/products.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Yes, and even worse, it uses up the wind.
This is just a modified savonius rotor. Why is it that all the dorks always apply for patents and claim 40%++ efficiency improvements -- maybe because they spend all there time polishing their shit and filing patent applications.
And it's all... horseshit.
/. crowd, by pulling us all in to wow at the latest, greatest power generation technique that's going to revolutionize our world.
5 58, or http://www.windstuffnow.com/main/vawt.htm.
What he's proposing is a Savonius windmill. A fancy aenometer. Which we already do much, much better with the Darrius approach. The maximum possible energy that we can get out of the wind is 59%. Savonius windmills are far, far less efficient, as they rely on drag, and not lift.
Of course, he claims that it works off of lift, which-- if his mill even exists in reality-- it probably does, but the fact that it only gets "a little" boost from lift means that it is almost completely drag based.
One problem that people have when visualizing a windmill is the question, "Why not do it like a paddle-wheel? Like on an old steam-boat?" Well, do you still see those old steam-boats tooling up the river and across the ocean. No? Maybe you should wondered why. It's because... surprise, surprise, it's less efficient.
Not to mention the ridiculous claims about hurricane/tornado proof design. And the centripital forces it's have to undergo at these speeds. (Real VAWTs tend to be able to spin at such high speeds that they are explosively dangerous.) And the torque exerted on the bearing coupling of a several story high building when there's 150mph of wind pressing on the top.
opensourceenergy.com seems to be nothing more than a shrewd attempt to make fun of the
For some real information on VAWTs, check out otherpower.com. For instance, http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2005/10/7/63930/5
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
if the downwind blade is travelling at windspeed, it is generating no force (and admittedly killing no birds who are flying with the wind, ie balloons). But, that implies that the upwind blade is travelling at twice the windspeed, relative to the wind.
So that little argument is rubbish.
Actually, the whole article is not too bad overall, we certainly see worse in real papers (eg the Guardian's coverage of that hydrogen atom fraud).
That is because airospace engineers are the main designers of these kind of machines. They know propellers, have all the systems to calculate what is possible with it, and through old designs of windmills (from 1400AD or even earlier) the principles pretty much stayed the same.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
I'll be honest, I really have to wonder about the whole windmills-killing-birds business. It always gets dragged up, but does anyone really know how many birds those propellers actually kill? I'm willing to bet it's very low; I also suspect way more birds are killed by flying into vehicles on the highway, or into the sides of highrise buildings (I had one kamikaze into my house last week, and that's not even a high rise).
The whole bird thing sounds like a convenient excuse invented by people who really oppose windmills because of noise or land use issues, but want a fuzzier, more PR-friendly excuse. The kill zone on a windmill is basically going to be the circle described by the rotor tips as they go through the air, so it's not a huge zone (as you get towards the center they're not moving as fast, tangentially) and at any given time it's not as if just flying into that ring would result in death, you'd have to be at a point at the particular moment in time when the blade moved through it. Last time I checked, birds don't hover, so you have two moving objects that would have to compete against some long odds to end up in the same place at the same time. Also, the turbines are noisy as hell -- something which is a legitimate criticism -- and I find it hard to imagine that birds wouldn't be scared off by the sound, air currents, and motion. (Actually they wouldn't make a bad large-scale scarecrow over farmland...)
Call me overly cynical but I find that particular objection dubious.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Maybe I could adjust rotating doors in shops to this design. Than it can power the lights or something like that. With enough wind, people will get sweeped into the store by this system too.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
That link just crashed firefox for me, careful with that link.
Anyone Remeber the Cousteau Turbo Sail, same principal.
Everything old is new again ? or just a case of two people reaching the same conclusion through trial and error.
If not this particular company and technology, the prices they are giving are in line with most analysts' expectations.
Like a lot of other technologies, this one is going down in price in a predictable way. Check out the wind energy data at earth-policy.org, especially that last figure.
The sector has recently been experiencing Hockey-stick growth in investment. It's pretty much inevitable that this is going to be cheaper than coal- and likely cheap enough to make hydrogen for when wind is low. Cheap, guaranteed price, non-polluting.
Judging from nuclear's track record, it won't come close to wind. These turbines might not be the ones to put nuclear out of its misery- but wind certainly will play a large part (don't discount solar just quite yet).
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
I remember seeing this design, with 3 pales, on a smaller scale, maybe 30cmx30cm, on top of frigo-wagons. When the train moves with high speed, the rotor will turn, thus generating power for keeping the wagon cool. I think they were backuped by batteries, or so.
;)
Can someone confirm this, as it's more that 20 years since i've seen such wagons moving around
Turbine? What turbine?? Oh.. that turbine! Yeah, sure! Cool turbine!
The National Research Council of Canada did a lot of work on Vertical Wind Turbines in the 'seventies. They even built some quite large turbines. It didn't work for a variety of reasons none of which seemed to be dealt with in tfa (but IANAAE). The following is an attempt at the one google hit that I found for "National Research Council" Canada "vertical wind turbine":
2 0control/other/Progress%20and%20recent%20trends%20 in%20wind%20energy.pdf
http://www.control.auc.dk/~zinck/papers/SoA%20WT%
the average flight speed of an unladen sparrow?
This link is the nicest derivation I have seen online of Betz's law regarding the maximum effiency (16/27 ~= 59%) of any non-compressible mass flow capture device. At least the article doesn't claim to exceed it (40%, I think). But as for high drag-devices getting a better effeciency than a variable-pitch propeller? That sounds pretty suspicious.
http://www.windpower.org/en/stat/betzpro.htm
On the other hand, if it can endure much higher winds than a prop installation, its OVERALL effeciency might be higher, because the energy in a mass flow is proportional to the cube of the wind-speed; so the 1% high wind speed tail of the distribution contributes a large portion of the total energy captured by the turbine. Of course, having a bit more REAL info would be helpful in determining if this is just slick FUD or something real. And when significant data is not mentioned, it does make one tend to think there is something to hide.
ok, so you have something that's quiet (which means that it makes no noise - also means calm and unmoving, as in "a quiet lake"). Can you have something that's more quiet?
I suppose if quiet means that it makes little noise, maybe. hmm seems like a poor choice of words. How about Quieter?
Reminds me of a question my son asked me. "Dad, if there's a fire in the kitchen, and I make the fire better, what did I do?"
This design does not create "pull" on the leeward side. There is no such thing as a negative aerodynamic force.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I was reading about this company a few days ago & I dug a little deeper because the info was sketchy.
What I found (and this article leaves out) is that there are a few negatives that need to be considered.
1. To do maintanence, you have to take the entire sucker apart in order to get at the bearings.
2. Height: Wind speeds are not even across various heights. There is a serious potential for nasty stresses when the wind is going faster at the top of this turbine than at the bottom.
3. I don't remember the others, but a balanced article should talk about the good and the bad
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The energy you can take from the wind is proportional to the area of the device, and the cube of the wind speed. Three-bladed wind turbines are tall and big because wind is faster higher up, and so they can sweep a huge area. A three blade arrangement is aerodynamically optimal, getting closest to the Betz limit of about 59% (not 20-30% or whatever the web page said).
Also, bird death is about 1 per turbine per year for current technology. This is about 9 orders of magnitude less than bird death from buildings/vehicles/airplanes etc., and that's not considering the enviornmental consequences on bird life of NOT using renewable sources...
Dumpy little vertical axis machines may have limited uses in isolated installation, and for revolving advertising, but they are not practical for large scale generation. The rotor of a modern 5MW wind turbine is about the same size as an athletics track. Imagine how big this vertical axis machine would have to be to match the wind capture of this. If the alternative is to have many small devices, there would be a very large number indeed: this carries costs of electrical interconnection, massive maintenance overhead from trillions of puny alternators and gearboxes, all of which was probably ignored in arriving at the 2.5 cents per kWh.
The only way to make money with this turbine is to be the poor guy's patent attourney.
I would like to call a halt to posting links from Open Source Energy. The site is run by crackpots and kooks who espouse completely insane ideas that have absolutely no basis in reality. It takes about 5 minutes of browsing for any reasonable person to determine this. Promoting this site is bad for slashdot. I do not joke when I say that posting links to this site is no better than posting links to some "intelligent" design site about new theories of evolution.
I agree, with oil priced so high, these people crawl out of the woodwork to apply for worthless patents and raise funds against those patents only to create nothing of value at the end.
It's a big fat scam, there were thousand of these guys crawled out of the woodwork when OLED's appeared, then thousands more making Fuel Cells using off the shelf parts, none of them do any inventing or make any new products. It all relies on people not knowing what the state of inventions already are, and being fooled that if the patent office issues a patent on an invention, that it's a new invention.
These rotors have been around in various forms since before the second world war and the twin vertical (autotilt) blade version you can buy now off the shelf cheaply.
a lot of electricity is used to power motors... e.g. the motor in your refrigerator.. so how about someone works out a clever way to use a rotating thingy (wind turbine or stirling engine) to wind a clockwork spring (or succession of, that wind each other) so that the mechanical rotational energy can be directly converted into ... mechanical rotational evergy !
or how about the fact that you might be using a WIND turbine to power the FAN in your air conditioning unit...
cue: lots of ducting, cogs, axles and grease. heh
sod it, i'm just gonna buy an old school windmill http://www.windmillworld.com/mills/forsale.htm
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
The birds get sucked into the propeller of course!
You don't know anything about windmills obviously, just talkin' that smart person techno jargon to make your post sound smart.
Hmm... If you were from Florida, you would perhaps know that it is not energy production thats a problem, but rather it is the power delivery at issue. ie. electrical lines that get snapped/cut/stretched/thrown around in the midst of a hurricane.
So it both blows AND sucks?
I am skeptic; it still looks like a meatgrinder to me. O.k it does not look like the propeller desigh that chops the bird, but when that thing is spinning at speed I am sure it pets the bird in the back as gently as a bud hits you with 50mph windspeed from the back ....
.......
just a visual observation, and probably they threw some chickens into their grinder before they claimed that.
Besides being an asshole critic, I really appreciate the aspect of renewable energy paired with not being a traditional meatgrinder
fact: did you guys know that costa rica is only using wind and water power? In fact we produce as much from these sources that CR exports energy to neighbouring countries; clean energy. In fact, while still considered a developing country, electricity coverage is the best in central AM, technically you have electricity everywhere. For US/European readers it is probably normal, but when you drive around in Panama/Nicaragua you canappreciate grid coverage here.
OK, water energy creates some mess with the environment in some cases especially when you have wetlands, because dams can affect these in a bad way, but still better than burning coal or radiating, etc.
I hope the net speed of the darn thing is zero. It would be very hard to connect it to the power grid if it is blowing all over the place.
Update your copy of Firefox or clean your system. I'm running FF 1.0.7 and the link worked fine for me.
birds make a great fuel source.
Why not kill two birds with one stone?
It only kills the stupid ones. I don't know what the birds are complaining about!
Modern turbine designs have taken these problems (and many others) into account and now kill very few birds - probably fewer than are killed by flying into electricity pylons. The main design changes are that they are much larger and slower rotating, so birds tend to judge the motion correctly and avoid them. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the Altamont Pass turbines are painted grey to reduce their visual impact against the sky, which also reduces their visibility to birds. Modern ones tend to be painted white, which makes them more visible.
On a recent visit to Denmark I was very impressed by the size and sheer number of turbines, turning gracefully, slowly and fairly unobtrusively. Occasionally there would be a small, faster-rotating one of an older design. These were noticeably more distracting and attention-grabbing - particularly in the peripheral vision (which after all is designed to look for rapid movement from predators). It's these older designs that have lead to most of the complaints from local residents, and understandably so.
Give me a modern turbine at the bottom of my garden any day - they are also virtually silent unlike their older cousins.
43 - For those who require slightly more than the answer to life, the universe and everything.
Hi,
I was at the UK national Bat conference this years and there were a couple of presentations on bat kills around wind turbines. It turns out that the strange noised attrach insects and therefore bats. Certain wind farms in the use, I forget which, are on migration paths for bats. There is a suggestion that they turn off the wind turbines come migration session.
Since bats are a key part of bug control, particularly in the US, you might want to think about protecting them,
Lonely
Nice, but this one look more high-tech to me:
http://www.turby.nl/
This is the third post I recall by Stirling D. Allan recently, the others being
The first in that list featured complete crackpot pseudoscience. The second seems to be of dubious scientific merit. A quick look at Mr. Allan's website shows they are involved with a number of other areas of pseudoscience (or to put it less kindly, scientific hoaxes) such as "magnet motors" and "zero point energy" (as an energy source). That together with the two other submissions he's made leads me to doubt the validity of the information in these "stories". The main problem, however, is that these are not balanced informative articles, but rather they seem to be little more than ads seeking venture capital. Furthermore, it looks like Slashdot is soon to become little more than a mouthpiece for opensourceenergy.org at this rate.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
It will do more work for you than your politicians.
but they forgot basic physics ke=mv^2, so for a doubling in velocity, the ke will quadruple, not octuple (unless of course there are added efficency gains from increasing rotor speed, but I doubt it) I call bunk.
These things don't look like they scale up very well. Wind power is all about swept area - or in this case profile area. To get more power you need more volume of air moving past. How does this type of design scale? Or is it limited to home use?
got it. it is 127.0.0.1. Now, time to launch an att...
As silly as that sounds it is true...
e .htm not the real article). Essentially the windmills act like a wind dam and that changes the weather on nearby beaches. I think what the report said is that the beach received more sunlight than it usually would.
About six months past I read in a German paper that in the North where the windmill parks have changed the local climate (http://www.msr.uni-bremen.de/werner/rw/RWOffshor
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I worked on vertical axis windmills at Uni in the 1970's, these drove either a car type alternator or a water pump. They were intended to be mass produced in third world countries to power radios or provide irragition. The self fethering design worked well did not self destruct and they are still in use.
Have you ever seen how big the Dutch windmills are? A simple tail flap would have to be huge to turn the windmill. A small steering windmill would be able to slowly turn the thing, thanks to that old "mechanical advantage" stuff you should've learned in physics (but alas, you were dozing).
wind turbines have to be way better for birds than COAL plants!
I think the question their article fails to answer is how much Kw per hour they are capable of generating with a constant wind speed and a typical sized generator. The 2.5c per Kw hour might be a fantastic price, but if it takes 5 days to generate 1 Kw then it would just be an unusable apparatus.
Development notes at http://devscribbles.blogspot.com
Wind farms do less damage to the environment than any other form of power generation other than solar, and kill fewer birds than the windowed office building that would be built to house the adiminstration for any form of power plant.
This is a serious issue and needs to be addressed! How did solar power get away with causing so little damage?? I propose that all solar arrays be built slightly concave, and reflect most of the light they don't absorb (we don't want to reduce efficiency), creating giant death rays. This way we can ignite birds that fly through the kill zone and correct this serious deficiency.
In an unrelated issue, I'd also like some serious effort to be put into breeding chickens that can fly.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Windaus Energy (Ontario, Canada) has developed prototypes of a vertical-axis wind turbine and are looking for places to install working demos.
From an announcement they sent out earlier this year:
Specifications are available on their website, including output, torque, power output. As other people have pointed out, there are some disadvantages to this style of turbine, but there are also some advantages. It looks far more suitable for local micro power than mega wind farms.
He looks just like Count Doku.
Generating costs estimated at 2.5 cents per kilowatt-hour
Okay, so I go to the web page, and it says:
Generating costs estimated at 3.5 cents per kilowatt-hour
Seems like a pretty important thing to screw up in the article description.
(Okay - I see - I go into the page, and later it says, 2.5 to 3.5 cents. Got it.)
Education is the silver bullet.
bleeding heart pussies
I guess you didn't notice that the story was also run by CBS News and Yahoo News, among other mainstream organs.
i nd
http://news.google.com/news?q=cheyenne+vertical+w
Tomorrow's news yesterday -- the bleeding, visionary edge.
Put them on the corners of a skyscraper and the power is used only feet away from its generation. Add this to the list for "GREEN" buildings. A good architect could also make the walls part of the foils sending the wind into it. It works at only 40ft off the ground, how about 40 stories off the ground?
I think what Mr. Taylor needs to do is demonstrate this new wind turbine technology and prove its claims to GE Energy.
GE Energy is one of the world's largest producers of wind turbines and if Taylor's design fulfills its claims this could mean GE Energy can build substantially smaller wind turbines that will sport way less visual impact, will far less likely endanger any nearby flying birds and will not generate the enormous noise levels that plague older wind turbine designs.
This could allow substantial expansion of wind turbine generator farms in just about anywhere in the world, including environmentally-sensitive places like Altamont Pass and southeast of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket Island.
I gotta say, those horizontal-axis wind turbines are HAWT.
qntm.org
Here are two companies who are offering commercial installations of VAWTs. Although they haven't sold many to date, at least we see that these are both past the R&D phase.
http://web.mckenziebay.com/
http://www.solwind.co.nz/vertical.htm
For the love of christ, stop posting pseudo science bullshit from Open Source Energy. This is like the 4th one this week.
___ alwaysBETA.com - Hey, you've got nothing better to do.
When I was in the Netherlands last year, I toured a large wind park north of Groningen. There, under the turbines, I saw a total of:
1 dead bird
1 dead sheep
From this, we can deduce that wind turbines are equally as deadly to sheep as they are to birds. The 800-1300 sheep killed annually must make the Altamont Pass a bloodbath of truely horrific proportions.
But seriously, folks...
The Altamont Pass is a disaster which was produced by irresponsible economic incentives of the time which put up low quality turbines willy-nilly throughout California. Add to that the fact that many of Altamont Pass's are placed on angle-iron framework towers. These make them ideal nesting grounds--well, if one ignores the 30 m food processor out front. Modern towers take great care in leaving no place for avian habitation.
This park's would otherwise be just a regional problem, but, thanks to more animal-focused environmental groups, and the tabloids who eat up their press releases, that wind park is biting us over here in Europe in the ass.
Altamont Pass is, however, the only wind park on earth with this level of environmental impact. Nothing comes close in these regards. A substantially larger off-shore wind park off the coast of Denmark (Knoetby, I think) actually showed that the birds weren't scared off, but instead kept a distance of about 150 m from the equipment.
Let's never post links to anything that challenges the consensus view of technologic capabilities!
After all, what did the airplane, high-speed trains, synthetic polymers, high-speed data communications, hydrogen fool cells, brushless electric synchronous motors, or any of those other heretical ideas give us that was worth all those other crackpot ideas we had to listen to?
It's far too painful to ever listen to nutcakes and charlatans, we must protect our delicate sensibilities and the pristine reputation of slashdot.org regardless of how many innovations we will consequently ignore!
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
How does this compare to Aerotecture? It looks to be the exact same idea. There is a video of this vertical wind turbine though. The direct link is here: http://www.aerotecture.com/media/aerotecture_dvd.w mv. My Azureus decentralized torrent of it is here: dht://5170DA0894C2862A8C61D5AA50437DF4AC935008.dht /announce (Never hosted a torrent before so I am not sure if this is how it works...)
"The back pressure creates a vortex that pulls it around, turning drag into lift,"
Every time people say such things in a marketing blurb, an aerodynamicist dies. Clap your hands! Clap your hands to save them!
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
See: Hummingbird.
I live in a forested steam valley. There is absolutely no wind at 40 feet because that's deep in the tree canopy and well below the hilltops. Hugh Piggot lives on the wind-blasted Scoraig Pennisula - some of his neighbors have wind generators that are literally just high enough off the ground so that the blades won't score the dirt.
If there's no wind at 40 feet, there's no wind generating ability. If there's 25 mph wind blowing through a tunnel, there's wind generating ability below ground!. Think about it for 2 picoseconds and see if your BS detector doesn't start going off.
Although split-barrel vawgs do work (and are appropriate to some conditions - like in the median strip of a tunnel) tower height is a variable that is site-dependent, and not technology-dependent.
That's not a bad idea, but unless I'm mistaken, a shunt-wound alternator can be electrically controlled to do essentially the same thing -- vary its mechanical load to work efficiently at various speeds.
Power goes up with the cube of the wind speed, so there's not much point in keeping the thing turning in very slow winds. That gives you a lower boundary to work with. There's also only so much power that a given alternator can put out before its windings overheat due to internal resistance, so that gives you an upper limit.
The ratio between those two limits would determine whether a mechanical transmission, or electrically controlled alternator, would be better suited.
Either way, if you're going HAWT, take a look at Mercotac instead of slip-rings, for getting the power down the tower. They offer lower resistance, longer lifespan, and no RF noise as the mechanism yaws around. (I'm not affiliated with Mercotac in any way, I just saw their products on the web a while ago and thought they'd be a perfect fit for wind turbine applications.)
No, since it's vaporware, the bird, or human hand for that matter, are not harmed in any way.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The placement of turbines is critical. Studies have been done in Europe and the Middle East. If turbines are placed outside of migratory routes, there is usually little bird kill.
However, I read something somewhere a while back indicating that using large numbers of conventional propeller type turbines in a "farm" type configuration dries out the surrounding landscape. Apparently the action of propellers creates updraft.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
I was going to comment on this as well. As someone who has been highly interested in windmills since I was a child (including building a simple wind generator when I was 12 using a bicycle generator), I instantly recognized it for a modified version of an "S"-rotor (Savonius) windmill. The only difference I could see in this version and the "classic" version is the addition of the wind-directing "airfoils". Whether these help or not (the inventor claims they do), the fact is that such designs have been tried in the past. Anyone who has read about homebrew alternative energy systems, knows that such designs have been tried in the past. This man may or may not have made some improvements since then - but I doubt it.
What most people today don't seem to realize, is that during the energy crisis of the 1970's, many, many old-time hippie-types and such got together and started to seriously "invent" a whole slew of alternative energy systems. Mother Earth News, Whole Earth Catalog (and The Well, of course), various alternative energy books - all were publications and such that either grew out of the movement, or helped the growth of, homebrew alternative energy systems. Several "homebrew" books were published which described a slew of windmill designs - from standard bladed designs (as well as restoring old "farm-power" windmills from the 1930's), to S-rotors, to more advanced designs. Most detailed homebrew charging systems and battery setups to complete the system for your "off-the-grid" living needs.
Unfortunately, since the public has such a small memory for history, they don't remember just how easy it is to build an S-rotor device (a few split 55 gallon drums, a welded frame, some guy wires, and an AC Delco alternator form the basis - any semi-competent tinkerer with a acetylene torch and some junk could build one for you in a week or less) - thus today you get people like this seeking to capitalize what appears to the public "something new". Of course, this guy looks old enough that he may have been one of the original hippy tinkerers, and he is looking to cash out (in whatever way) now - who knows?
Regardless, the S-rotor design, while lacking in efficiency, makes up for it in its strength of being able to be constructed out of surplus industrial containers, normally recycled as steel (or alluminum, or plastic nowadays) scrap. They are easy to build, and the materials are cheap - I would be willing to bet an individual could gather all the materials needed (including generator!) for free, provided he was willing to go around town on "bulk-trash" pickup days, and keep an eye out for junk on the road, etc. Even if he had to pay, he could gather all the materials for under $200.00.
Building such a windmill (provided you have the wind, of course - unfortunately, here in the Phoenix area we don't really have enough wind year-round to make it worth much effort beyond experimentation - but we do have plenty of sun for other alternative energy systems!), while it won't make you independent by itself, would form a useful and inexpensive addition to the rest of whatever system you may have. S-rotors are practically noiseless, and although inefficient, they are easily built so several could be built with little cash outlay - overcome the inefficiency issue by sheer number. If you are lucky enough to live on a large plot of land that you can do this kind of thing, and you have the tools, the skill, and the time, it is a worthwhile investment for your energy needs. Build it out of free junk, and as soon as it starts turning and making energy, you are saving money!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Comaparing the dot com bubble of the late 90's to a simultaneous increasing need for energy and decrease in it's availability, and the solutions to that problem is like comparing the invasion of Iraq to WWII.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
This is the third time I get to post this link in roughly 2 weeks.
Sterling D. Allan's personal website. Check out some of the other websites he has founded and administers. Not to say that real scientists can't be religious or spiritual, but... come on... Given that the articles submitted here by Mr. Allan are more pseudo-science than anything, coupled with that list of websites, there's absolutely no reason this stuff should be on Slashdot, let alone the front page. Yeesh...
What's more dangerous, Slashdot; anti-science or pseudo-science?
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
It is worth noting that the Altimont wind farms seem to be a notable exception. Due to the size of the farm, older wind turbine design, and poor placement along migratory paths of birds and in hunting grounds of birds, the Altimont wind farm does cause 1000s of deaths per year. However, this can be significantly mitigated by better location selection and using recent turbine designs.
In sum, the bird death issue is a red herron.First Falcon-1 to orbit, then Falcon-9. Then I can die a happy man.
IF these are tall enough, put cell phone equipment on top. They'd be more attractive than ordinary cell towers. Then route some of the electricty to the cell equipment. Even if a storm knocks out your power lines, you could still have cell signal at unharmed towers. We all know more Katrinas are coming.
It's strange that the sight of sails on boats moving laterally is ok and actually thought attractive by most people, but the sight of sails rotating disturbs some people.
to err is human, to forgive is divine, to forget is... umm...
There are several hard problems in wind turbine design. One is that, for large wind machines, wind speed may vary considerably across different parts of the blade area. This produces huge stresses in the blade system. Aircraft propellers and hubs don't have that problem, so technology borrowed from aircraft props didn't quite work. That's been solved, but it took years to get past it.
A basic problem, one which this new design doesn't solve, is overspeed protection. Wind turbines above toy size must be able to deal with high wind conditions safely. Some turn sideways; some turn upwards; some feather the props. Brakes aren't enough. There's no way to feather or turn this new design. Even small turbines need, and have, overspeed protection.
There are lots of wind machine designs that more or less work in a small size, but don't scale up to the point where they're worth building. There's a square law; double the blade length and get four times the energy out. So big turbines beat out little ones, once ths scaling problems are solved. Wind turbine size has been creeping up since the 1970s, from about 50KW to a few megawatts.
A 1.5 MW unit was built in the 1940s, but it suffered a bearing failure within a year, then a loss of blade accident which threw a blade 700 feet. Only in the past decade have reliable wind machines in that size range been produced in quantity. With 2800 of their 1.5MW units installed, General Electric can be said to have solved that scaling problem.
The big machines aren't simple. They have active yaw control, active pitch control, hydraulic brakes, AC to DC to AC variable frequency conversion, and lightning protection. But, at last, they work.
So these guys are going to beat that with a little tin model that looks like something used to spin a sign in a used car lot. Right.
To be quite fair to the grandparent, I've heard plenty of self-proclaimed environmentalists complain about aesthetics. Usually, though, they find some easier to argue position like "we have to think of the birds." Talking energy with them typically goes something like this:
Environut: Global warming is going to kill us all. We have to stop the evil oil companies bent of world destruction.
Engineer: Well then, let's invest some money in clean, reliable nuclear power plant design
Environut: Are you kidding. Those things are radioactive and they meltdown all the time. Plus Tom Brokaw says terrorists can blow them up with molotav cocktails and kill us all.
Engineer: I don't think you understand the issue fully, but ok, how about natural gas.
Environut: I heard through from my neighbor's, best friend's, third cousin who is an expert in environmental peace engineering at Evergreen Community College that natural gas tankers can explode with the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Engineer: The stored gas has equivalent chemical energy, yes, but it's release is dependent on the oxygen that can be supplied. The absolute worst case scenario is a really big fire. Still, if you're not comfortable with that, how about hydro power in locations where it's available?
Environut: Disrupts salmon spawning.
Engineer: Wind power?
Environut: Kills birds
Engineer: Geothermal?
Environut: Haven't you seen Core? You'll stop the earth's core from spinning, cause earthquakes, and kill the yellowstone geysers. Engineer: Umm, how about tidal generators for coastal cities?
Environut: Absolutely not. They destroy the reefs to build them and devastate the shoreline ecostructure by reducing wave action
Engineer: How about investing in Fusion research?
Environut: Doesn't that involve atoms? I don't like atoms and I think they should be banned by international treaty because terrorists can build dirty bombs out of them.
Engineer: I suppose you have something against solar power too?
Environut: Oh no. I love solar power. It will save us from global warming, cure world hunger, end racism, and get Barbara Streisand elected president.
Engineer: Well, it does have its benefits, but it's only practical in a limited part of the world and it's currently nowhere near as cost-effective as other forms of energy production
Environut: I knew it! You're just another puppet for big oil. Why do you hate the baby seals? What did they ever do to you? Murderer!
Ok, that's exagerated a little bit, but I bet if I pulled snippets from enough old posts on Slashdot, I could come up with that conversation without too much trouble.
Kind of looks like one of those whirly-gigs made out of beer cans. Maybe if these guys had gone on more bends we could have these in production by now.
ab_iron
Anyone else here think that "Ronald Taylor" looks like Count Dooku?
Actually, the absolute worst-case scenario is a BLEVE, which you Do Not Want. When all of the factors are right, heat from a really big fire boils the LNG in its tank, overwhelming the pressure-relief valve. The valve sends up a shrieking tower of flame as it fails to keep up with the rising pressure, and everything that I've read suggests that you shouldn't stop running while you can still hear it, because what happens next is ugly. The tank ruptures, sending shrapnel flying, and the pressurized gas explodes out, only to discover that it now has an opportunity to catch fire as it's already exploding.
This sort of "meta-explosion" doesn't happen every time some fire gets near a gas tank, of course: it's only the worst case.
That aside, it seems that about once every year or two a house somewhere in North America suffers from a natural gas leak in the basement and subsequent explosion that demolishes the house in question and badly damages the neighbouring dwellings. I've never seen an "enviro-nut" bring that up, though.
Mind the Gap
I have seen this article posted several places recently. I'm gald this one has pictures. I kept picturing a giant eggbeater.
Think Deeply.
Your points are true only on a small scale, they fail on anything large.
All windmills slow the wind. If you add a second windmill, and the wind is blowing such that it would go from one to the next (in absence of any windmills/trees/buildings), the second windmill will see slower wind than the first, and thus generate less power.
All windmills create turbulence zones around them, mostly downwind. This too decreases the efficiency of the windmills downwind.
The only solutions to these problems is to space your windmills farther apart, or live with reduced efficiency.
As an aside, the above effects are why normal windmills have 3 blades, and not many - after every blade passes they need to wait for the slow wind to get out of the way to generate maximum power. (1 or 2 blade windmills would be better yet, but there are other technical details that make them less impractical in the real world) I suspect that you would get more power from your homebuilt generators if you got rid of a few of your blades - but of course you would need to experiment to see.
The last problem with scaling is you cannot just go up forever. There are substantial differences in windspeed and direction with altitude. Direction is mostly something airplanes worry about (and it doesn't matter to vertical axis turbines anyway). Speed is a different matter - wind near the ground is always slower than wind farther up. So if your turbine is tall enough, say 30 meters and near the ground, you lose energy because the wind higher up is acting as a fan to push the wind lower down. You can move the whole system up, but then you lose the advantage of the generators being near ground.
Simplicity is great, except that simple stuff may to be reliable. If you like tinkering with your windturbines as a hobby, this is not a problem. If you just want to use lights and such without worrying about the generation wind is not for you. The utilities can pay for complex solutions that are engineered to be reliable. They also have the ability to deal with unexpected problems. If one of your turbines breaks you are down to half power (assuming your solar input is negligible, you didn't specify so I don't know what it is), to the power company that is less than 1%.
This article both sucks and blows. Quite impressive.
What's that, slashdot karma points??? HA! I got your karma points right here!!
When I saw the photo, I immediately thought of my local library's copy of a hippy-era how-to on building a vertical-axis wind generator out of 55-gallon drums, plywood and junkyard auto parts like axle bearings and alternators. It's called "Wind and Windspinners: A Nuts and Bolts Approach to Wind-Electric Systems" by Michael Hackleman.
Basically, you cut the drum in half longways, and then offset the halves from each other to form an "S" shape with the two halves overlapping slightly, so that wind enters the open side, follows its contour into the closed side and exits out the back. The book recommended stacking 3 such drums, offset 60 degrees from each other and with plywood circles between the drums to prevent spilled wind. If you want to get fancy, you build sprung gates into the backs of the drums so they can dump excess wind in a storm. There are some drawings and photos of the design here.
I think Hackleman's reason for championing the Savonius design had nothing to do with efficiency - instead, it was all about cost, simplicity and durability. Fits right into the microgrid idea - a small village in the third world could assemble a few of the cheap homemade versions of these and link them to a battery bank to get themselves some simple, reliable electricity for whatever they needed to power.
6. Audible Alarm (not shown)
-from a Cuisinart product owner's manual.
To be perfectly honest, I have no idea how those people became Foed. It was rather disturbing actually.
What's that noise - not a certain Famous Person spinning in the grave perchance???? :-)
"We've never seen a dead bird at our test site." Likely this is because birds dont normally fly into solid walls.
Well that explains why I almost never see a flock of birds embedded in the side of my house.
He notes that his company has been able to secure permission to install their turbine in several California counties where propeller turbines are banned because of the known bird carnage.
I'm sorry, did you say.. bird carnage? California has banned pollution-free power generation because some birds flew into the props? Is this some sort of epidemic? Are the birds, literally, flocking to the propellors?
One of the primary environmental drawbacks of the propeller wind turbines is that...the tips of the blades spin much faster than the wind speed, chopping through the air sometimes at speeds of 200 mph. The birds generally just don't see them coming.
Well isn't this for the best? The smart birds will fly around the propellors, and the rest will be killed. Eventually we'll have smart birds, and the world will be a better place for it. Natural selection at work.
(I just hope Californians never find out that a staggering amount of birds are killed by the common house cat. Wait a minute, I hate cats. I think I'll write a letter, and with any luck they'll ban cats in California.)
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Their general US patent:T O2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r =1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ptxt&s1=6,015,258.WKU.&OS=PN /6,015,258&RS=PN/6,015,258
5 70076-Moya-Terra-Aqua-Inc.html
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
I didn't bother making links to non-US patents but you can find them at the company website. According to the company the patent process is still continuing.
Contact information (note that it is a private company):
http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/merc-compint-0000
Their website:
http://www.tmainc.net/
I'm not impressed with the journalistic and editorial abilities of either Slashdot or OpenSourceEnergy. And I guess there shouldn't be any need to mention that most people on Slashdot talk out of their asses... (some even try to hide behind PhD's instead of actually making an argument - that's low!).
I suggest people do a bit of searching and reading on their own before making absolute statements about the "newsstories", be it this one or about hydrinos or whatever, otherwise all you're doing is succumbing to groupthink and knee-jerk reactionism. Have some pride (irrespective of whatever opinion you end up with).
this comment is provided "as is" and without any express or implied legibility or congruity [...]
I saw vertical-axis windmills when I passed thru western Afghanistan in 1964. Google images turns up an older more decrepit version of what I saw ahref=http://www.geh.org/ne/str114/m198503951170.j pgrel=url2html-21303http://www.geh.org/ne/str114/m 198503951170.jpg>
---jon claerbout
That's about all this is. Is it really worthy of patents?
If you look carefully under the diagram (Fig 1) there are two links to one of the patents - #6,015,258. Pictures and all (although the uspto site didn't show the pics properly for me). Text version or PDF.
This sig is covered under the GPL.
Why is everyone so concerned with the "bird carnage" of windmills?
Pollution from traditional power plants kills many more animals and people than wind turbines ever will.
Do a Search for Lance Turner and Savonius wind turbine. Why is this guy being hailed as if he is the one who invented this device?