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Microwind Generator For Low Power Systems
An anonymous reader wrote in to say that "Shawn Frayne, has developed Windbelt,
efficient, cheap lowpower wind generator built out of taut kite fabric." Everyone has seen the video where the suspension bridge is ripped apart by wind- his idea was to use the same thing to generate power. I doubt I'll be running my desktop off it any time soon, but it's a cool idea.
And now for a really interesting renewable energy concept: kite gen. Would have made Newton smile :)
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security - Ben Franklin
I think these would sell.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Could jogging appearal be made for the tin foil cap people?
WWPD - What Would Picard Do?
...but it is not at all clear what their efficiency or $/Watt or manufacturing cost will be. Although absolute efficiency is maybe not critical for many applications given that the wind is free, cost is important in, for example, third-world deployments.
See the discussion here for example: http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2007/10/13/9445/4984
Much as I'm intrigued by this let's not get into perpetual motion machines nor "beating Betz" just yet! In particular the "30x as efficient as the best microturbines" claim in TFA is particularly suspect: I have a VAWT made from a cardboard cereal packet in my back garden that probably extracts 10% of the available energy.
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
You set up a challenge for some charity, everyone pays an entry fee or a slightly overpriced beer. Now, as they drink, when ever they have to fart or belch, they do it in the direction of the generator. Who ever generates the most electricity WINS!
Huh!? What d'ya think?
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
At least for the 3rd or developing world. Look. They barely have roads and running water. LEDs, mylar are top of the pyramid technical feats.
For niche markets in the developed world though it could be interesting.
Deleted
What did they teach it? Um, Editors, I think the word you're looking for is 'taut'.
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
I recently was looking at microturbines for my urban house recently and decided it was a bad idea because of the noise they make when the wind isnt going fast and people are trying to sleep - woosh...woosh...woosh...woosh...
I wonder if this makes a noise. buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
I have decided to use these instead of microturbines and added a pivot and tail so it can turn with the wind direction, and put 20 up on my roof. Would be interesting to see how the buzz multiplies. Would I be living under a swarm of bees?
So will the power output be measured in bridges per minute?
(In fiction at least) The Subways Of Tazoo, Colin Kapp, 1964. In the story, it was strings rather than ribbons. The story involves an alien race that killed themselves by climate change. Tsk, what science-fiction twaddle!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Could someone explain the science behind this? I remember from high school physics that the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was used as an example of forced resonance, but now I see from the Wikipedia article that resonance has nothing to do with it, and that complicated aerodynamics come in to play. Are there any experts out there who could conjecture on how the Windbelt actually works and explain it in terms of the bridge collapse?
Phoenix, Boston, Little Rock, see a pattern?
This turbine was one of the items mentioned few days ago on Slashdot in another post. See: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/11/212243
The only sure way to help countries of the third world is for countries like the US to open up their subsidized markets. The corn market in the US for example is subsidized to an extent of almost 10 billion dollars in 2005!
If third world countries got just half of that market, a lot of lives would be changed.
Instead of blowing wind, we've been vibrating strings by plucking them with our fingers. This is how our electric guitars work.
One problem that I see is that the current generated is AC. It has to be converted to DC to be useful. That means we need rectifiers with very low forward voltage drop because there won't be much voltage from the generator. Because the generator is producing AC and the generators probably can't be synchronized, you won't be able to hook them up in series to get more voltage. In order for this invention to be useful, some work is still required.
Shawn Frayne's Windbelt Wins Popular Mechanics 2007 Breakthrough Award
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
From the summary: taught kite fabric.
Must be some kind of memory fiber that returns to its original shape when the wind stops blowing.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
On a windy day you won't have to crank your computer!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
That's "taut", for you half-literate people. It means "tight, under tension". One might use it to describe sails on a ship while the wind blows hard, or a rope.
I may be an English nazi, but my children will not write like they're half-wits.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
It wasn't just the wind, it was also the resonance of the poorly designed structure.
The wind was just the power to get it to resonate, from that point on it was all vibrations.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This was just posted on Thursday.
"Flamebait"? This should be "Informative".
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
Taco, don't you just use the free Mac laptop you got from Apple for shamelessly pimping them?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
This right here is what science and inventing is all about. Forget how things have been done in the past and come up with something better.
If you think about it, the wind turbine is essentially based on the old windmill design that has been around for centuries. It's reasonable to think that when people people were first thinking of a way to harness wind energy, that was the first thing they thought of for that exact reason.
Technoli
There was not any engineering detail to go on from the video, I agree. But trashing the idea without getting the numbers is bad science, more akin to the nightly news.
The whole concept is interesting, because it can work with wood and cloth instead of mylar and aluminum. The "first world" part would be the magnet, coils and the DC rectifier/converter to allow a user to likely charge a battery.
How many of these generators and how big they would be to extract a usable 10 watts of charging power in a 5-10 mph wind hasn't been defined, but with a couple models, that can be determined.
You never learn anything by bitching. Buckling up and testing is the way this & other ideas will be understood and improved. For the 3rd world, just a minimal LED lamp array can make the difference between studying at night or not.
Grow up. This isn't some situation where "the good is the enemy of the best" applies. Applying this solution to improve the quality of people's lives now won't have an effect one way or the other on whether your favored "magic bullet" solution is ever adopted.
You are thinking too in the box when you think a pet project can't go and help third world countries. It all must start with a small idea first. How do you think the XO-laptop was developed? I'm sure it started with a really simple mockup prototype at the earliest stages, a "pet project".
It all starts with some dude tinkering in his garage, in his office playing with components. Then you go to the engineering/R and D level which applies the PRINCIPLES of the pet project onto a larger scale. Not the same little toy, but the same concepts shown in the toy. Once a device has been built that captures the same principles at a much larger level, it then can be sent to third world countries. Solar panels started out as a "pet project" in some scientist's lab in the middle of the 20th century. They're now being sent all around third world countries to run water pumps to help villages get water, run Buddhist monasteries in the Himalayas, etc...
Either they are hyping the product or they've made miscalculations to it's efficiency.
Things are pretty much never 30x more efficient, ever, so for some kid to put together magnets and kite fabric and make those claims brings back memories of cold fusion for me.
Scientifically it's prefect possible that under very low wind conditions this thing is much more efficieny than turbines which are made specifically to be placed in high wind areas.
The question of the hour is if this thing could be scaled upwards and still compete with a turbine, not if it would be an efficient power generation technique for inscets. Their claim to 30x efficiency is one big strike against the chances of this being real. You'd have to realize that claim cannot be true.. peroid.
The question isn't really how efficient it is anyway, it's whats the cost/watt, cost to develop, and max power you can realistically expect.
In microwind conditions I'm sure a kite unbetween magnetcs does well in relation to a giant turbine windmill, but that's only because a turbine needs a min wind speed to work and a kite doesn't. At some point this devince would be nearly infinately more efficieny than a turbine as the wind speed curve declines the efficiency of a microwind device increases unproportionately to it's practical electric output potential.
The interesting experiment would be to make a big array of those things and see if in high wind conditions they can actually keep an efficiency edge. I think it's an interesting design, but could be improved upon vastly to make it more feasible for large scale power needs. Something like a metalic woven fiber between magnets would seems to be to produce more power.
Perhaps he is creating large amount of voltage wth low amps such as static electricity or tasers and it's throwing off the efficiency measurments, but most likely it's just the hypothetically most advantageous situation possible in an unproven estimate.
Nothig new here. It works on the same principle electric guitars and old spring reverbs work, with the difference that guitar pickups are placed where the string shows a stronger vibration, while he put his coils near the "string" attachment. If he put them more close to half string length the generator would produce much more power.
I would also try other methods for producing energy through vibration; piezoelectric transducers could be a viable alternative.
Hear, hear! Well said, AC.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It's so Popular Mechanics. Another resonant oscillating generator.
This is an old idea, but the usual form is a free-piston engine. Popular Mechanics was hot about that one back in 2004. For something that will light two LEDs, that thing looks big and expensive. Note the machined aluminum frame. For comparison, here's a toy wind generator kit ("convert a plastic bottle to a wind generator!").
Notice how the guy with the vibrating ribbon generator demonstrates it in front of an electric fan. On high. That's probably because it only works in a strong wind. People generally don't live where winds are regularly that high. Wind speed in Port-au-Prince has been between 9 and 12MPH all day, so something that cuts in around 9MPH is needed for use in Haiti.
The classic cheapie generator is taking an oil drum, cutting it in half, and using that as a Savonius rotor. Then you get an alternator from a car, and there's your actual generator. The axle sticks up into the air, where the halves of the oil drum collect the wind and turn the alternator. Here's a smaller version.
"but now I see from the Wikipedia article that resonance has nothing to do with it"
Did you read the whole article, because you seem to have missed this part,
"The wind-induced collapse occurred on November 7, 1940 at 11:00 AM(Pacific time), due partially to a physical phenomenon known as mechanical resonance."
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
Why doesn't he use the same source of power that's running the fan?
Common sense isn't so common, is it?
RTFA. This thing is for lighting LED lights at night. The efficiency of the solar panel at night is probably 0. Or is it infinite? Either way, no juice unless there's sun.
I'm not saying that this is the greatest thing since sliced bread, BUT... Those who think a thing to be impossible should shut up and get out of the way of those who are doing it. You can waste your time cursing the darkness, but it's probably not going to be as productive as trying to light a candle. Or an LED.
Looks interesting, but it makes me skeptical when no real data is given. I'd be more interested in see him hook it to a multimeter and test it out at different wind speeds. Or put it outside and measure the output for a week.
This is only a prototype, but obvious improvements would be to put magnets and coils on both ends, or along the entire length.
Picture this, you have a machine that takes two strips of heat fusible plastic and fuses them around coils of wire, so you have a roll of tape that has coils of wire embedded along its entire length.
You then have a second machine that takes a single coil of mylar and applies a thin film magnet along it's entire length. So now you have two rolls of plastic tape, one with embedded coils, the other with a thin film magnet.
Now you cut alternating strips from both spools and mount them under tension in a window frame, like horizontal louvered blinds and let the wind vibrate all of the strips. The power is being generated along the entire legnth of the strips now, and the coil wire tape and the thin film magnet tape should have different resonant frequencies so that the alternating strips will be vibrating asynchronously along their lengths. Seems like it would produce far more power this way than his original basic prototype.
I have one question. If the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture is not in charge of Gundam, then who is?
I'd like to point out that is global warming is real and we are going to do anything about it, we ALL need to learn to live with less power consumption.
Heck even if global warming is bunk, if the Chinese keep their head long rush to consume like westerners, then we are ALL going to need to do more with less.
The other question is how well will it scale?
Think Deeply.
Or take one salvaged windshield-wiper motor with a three blades. Maybe $15 for 10 watts, or $1.50 per watt. Which is cheaper and easier to install and maintain?
Now, if someone can develop a small 'personal' version of the 'windbelt' thats fits inside one's shorts, in close proximity to the sphincter, then we can /really/ harness some 'wind power'.
This article is a dupe. Here's what I said about Shawn last time:
:More about Shawn at MIT by arbitraryaardvark (Score:4)
===
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/11/212243
Low-tech Inventions That Help Change Lives
arbitraryaardvark (845916) on Thursday October 11, @07:41PM (#20947701)
(http://vark.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday October 12, @03:26AM)
http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2004/10/65276 [wired.com]
A MacGyver for the Third World
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aidg/612856202/in/set-72157600466239024/ [flickr.com]
flickr
http://instapundit.com/archives2/010388.php [instapundit.com]
instapundit is blogging the conference
http://www.aidg.org/component/option,com_jd-wp/Itemid,34/p,33/ [aidg.org]
some blog
Shawn Frayne is the founder of Haddock Invention LLC and its recent spin-off company, Humdinger Wind Energy, LLC. The mission of these companies is two-fold. First, to create technologies that can address long-standing problems in developing countries; and second, to leverage the novel aspects of those inventions through licensing deals in capital-rich nations such as the U.S., thereby generating a self-supporting revenue stream for the projects.
His work has so far focused in the fields of solar water disinfection, inflatable packaging, food preservation, charcoal-production, and wind power generation, with several products successfully licensed or sold. It was during his time as a student in MIT's D-Lab that Shawn first became convinced that the key inventions of the next century won't necessarily be born in wealthy countries. Rather, the new industries of the coming years will be founded on breakthrough technologies invented in Haiti or Zambia or Guatemala, where the hardest problems in the world will yield the greatest inventions.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
even more
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nice idea, but I could imagine the noise problem as a major obstacle.
Popular Mechanics is just a front for Press Releases most of the time and probably lost most their educated staff many years ago back when I stopped reading the trash it became (not that it was ever a quality source for science news.)
Look at savonius for cheap power.
Off the top of my head:
Take the design from those shake flashlights (aka "jerk off" lights) and balance the thing so it can totter up and down enough for the magnet to slide past the coil. Then hook up just about anything that will flap in the wind to the other side...
One could also use a simple air foil which mechanically alters its own pitch (to create a wave motion) and have it pump the shake light magnet up and down... Or the magnet could be lifted up and down thru wave motion and no wind is required at all. 2 different methods of power!
Popular Mechanics can send my award money to slashdot.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
> This is only a prototype, but obvious improvements would be to put magnets and coils on both ends, or along the entire length.
;-)
No, because:
"In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"
This thing is not Perpetuum Mobile, but a wind generator.
The wind is slowed down while making the string oscillate, and this oscillation is then damped by the magnet moving between the coils. In each stage, energy is converted, with some loss.
If the size of the Magnet and the coils is optimized against the size of the string, such that the energy generated in the coils is maximized at a certain ratio of dampening and excitation, then putting another dampening coil at the other end gains you nothing, except extra expenditure for a second set of electromechanical parts.
It probably requires a superb understanding of fluid dynamics, or lots of experience, or a large amount of experimenting, or, most probably, a combination of all three to optimize the arrangement.
I would wager the inventor of this gadget has a more useful combination of the three aforementioned requirements than most of the commenters slashdot
Okay, that may have been a little bit unfair, so I am giving You a chance to ridicule my proposition:
"Maybe it would be better to put a spring and the magnet in series at one end of the oscillating string, because then the way the magnet moves longitudinally would be the square of the lateral amplitude of the strings oscillation, rather than linear as in the current setup. This might provide a more stable working point over varying wind strengths?"
*** Now come on guys, have flame fest! ***
Wind power is very well understood. The power in the wind is (1/2)*p*A*v^3. Where p is air density in units (kg/m^3), A is the swept area in units (m^2) and v is the velocity of the wind in units (m/s). This is intuitive from a physics perspective if the energy of a moving object is (1/2)*m*v^2 then p*A*v is mass. Albert Betz proved that the maximum efficiency of a wind generating device is 59%. Many small wind turbines can achieve an efficiency of over 30%. From the article it says "his device [is] 10 to 30 times as efficient as the best microturbines" That would put the efficiency of the device at at least 300%. Not only is that higher than the betz limit it is higher than the energy available. A quick example. Lets use an air density of 1 and a swept area of 1 (for a rotary turbine this would be a blade radius of .56m), a wind velocity of 10mph (4.47 m/s) and an efficiency of 30%. This will make 13.4 watts of power. That would be enough to power several small led light.
uses unconventional wind generators too.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
uses unconventional wind generators too.
Theo Jansen
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
awesome! this is a dramatic improvement of my idea to line the nation's highways with millions of cheap and disposable/easily-repairable wind-to-energy devices to recapture all that lost power!
My assessment:
pluss:
-Will not kill birds
minus:
-expensive,
-noisy, and
-inefficient
A propeller and a generator is currently mass produced, cheap and efficient. In the setup the fan probably draws 300W, and the belt generates 1W, or 0.3% efficiency. What a joke.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
As for the frame you're referring to that could easily be made of local materials like wood or recycled plastic or almost anything that will put tension on the material.
Build it vertically, put the generator at the top, hang a weight on the bottom, trim it to the desired wind speed by adjusting the weight.
It might even be possible to come up with a mechanism to adjust the tension to the wind speed using a couple of levers and a vane attached to the counterweight and the frame.
So what's all this about Taco Man? And just how powerful are his mighty arrows?
I saw the tag tacomanarrows and was thinking "WTF are Man Arrows!?" for a while before I realised what the tag meant.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
The Space Elevator projects face a problem of aiming their beam at a climber on a vibrating tether under tension.
Just thought I'd point this out to everyone here.
This is more like a ribbon microphone than anything. Ways to change the output and efficiency:
1) Using super-efficient magnets and coil windings
2) Studies into super light weight and flexible materials ( preferably made out of cheap materials or waste). They would also have to be cleaned easily or not accumulate any residue from climate, or bird crap.
3) Create an auto-tensioner for the membrane that is adjusted by a sensor that detects wind speed. Could be run off a computer that has aggregate wind model data for a region synced to 24 hr. wind speeds.
4) Possible suspending of the magnet in a ferofluid that overcomes the effects of gravity and makes it that much easier for it to travel off miniscule amounts of wind.
5) Possibly using multiple nano-sized motors in an all-in-one module attached to the membrane. Maybe enclosed in a vacuum.
-The best possible thing would for every manufacturer to start making DC power supplies for their products instead of AC. If everyone was using DC instead of AC with the supply coming from their own property, you would not have to worry about transmission losses and distribution. DC would be more efficient. This was the whole debate when AC and DC power were first developed and trying to get public support. The power equivalent of BETA vs. VHS.
The website says there will be kits in the near future, probably most useful for middle school science fair projects and so on:
http://www.humdingerwind.com/kits.html
Why don't we choose the best energy system we have today. Simply modelled, it is a superconductor ring with an EM wave travelling around it. When the wave travels through an inductor connected to a secondary circuit it produces a current in that secondary circuit. I know about its existence as I was stabbed by an arseXXXX when I started talking to people about it (approx 1-2 years ago). It is free energy. It is non-polluting, probably uses very low pressure nitrogen as a refrigerant, does not explode when cracked, provides unlimited energy (you don't turn it off) etc. My blog is at http://overunityenergy.blogspot.com/ and provides other evidence of its existence.
Amen, Brother!
Seriously. We ARE in deep shit. I think if we can find a source of energy cheaper than foreign oil and start extra-taxing goods not 'Made in the USA', we may be able to rebound.
Most modern wind turbines don't have a gearbox. That's one of the reasons a 1G windpark is more quiet nowadays than an 1G coal or nuclear power station.
Trust me, I work for the government.
...the first thing that came to mind when I S(kimmed)TFA was those little flashlights that you shake up to charge. Could this tower design be expanded by, say, multiple magnets/coils along the length of the belt? I'm not talking about a large number of magnets, or anything particularly heavy of course, just something that will add a little extra kick to the single-magnet design shown in the article, without adding to the device's physical footprint.
I am proud of you Fralin, and your windbelt. askinventor.com
Shawn Frayne, proud of you boy. I kind of figured all those hits from your neck of the woods in California was going to spawn something great. Good work! You get the askinventor award.
Any ideas?
In contrast, this new vertical idea is tuned for low wind conditions, low power gen, and for all practical intents and purposes has one moving part. Pure genius in terms of non-grid electrical usage. A right sized windvane plus a much more moderate PV panel and charging system would be enough for a rural-minimal power setup, or maybe to be the seed power for another form of energy generation: a methane digester which basically can take any form of tiny chopped up bio-waste or *ahem* post-digested organic materials... and when blended with water and allowed to stew properly at the right temps will produce moderate amounts of methane that can be used for heating, cooling, and power apps...
Let's see where this pans out....
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
"Haven't you ever made a blade of grass whistle between your thumbs?"
I'm whistling impaired, you insensitive clod!
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Produce the coil, magnet and rectifier as a module. Ship it to third world countries either with the airfoil, possibly in kit form so that they might be able to assemble it locally. In addition, make the generator module available separately. Some innovative locals might be able to find some other sources of reciprocating motion that they can harness for a small amount of power.
Have gnu, will travel.
What you free trade types eternally fail to grasp is that people aren't nice, don't always play by the same rules, and frequently use their economies to damage each other.
What you protectionist doom-and-gloomers eternally fail to grasp is that free economies, by definition, cannot be used to "hurt each other", as they are not controlled by anyone. Highly regulated mixed economies, on the other hand, like the one we are in, can be controlled in that manner; that's what regulation *means*.
To me, it seems like you have a rose-colored world view that is simply not borne out by history and current events.
The entire history and events of the last century shows conclusively that the freer a society is -- including freedom of trade -- the more prosperous its people are. The more controlled it is, the poorer -- and not so coincidentally, more warlike -- it has been.
Your world view isn't "rose colored", it is the blackness of the willfully blind.
We are transferring massive amounts of money to China in exchange for cheap imports, while simultaneously losing the ability to provide for ourselves. What good are these customers of whom you speak, when there are no longer any American producers of those products? Explain to me how this is good, how it grows our economy?
Well, it HAS grown substantially, despite the almost complete lack of American manufacturing base in certain industries for many years. That contradicts your theory, not the free traders', so it seems to me that you're the one with some explaining to do.
This is not a joke, this is not some philosophical issue with no real-world effects: when a major economy falls people get hurt. Ours is heading for a fall of Biblical proportions, and it's you Free Traders that will bear a significant responsibility for that event.
Oh, we'll get the *blame*, no doubt -- that's usually how it goes. We always get the blame for what is fundamentally the interventionists' fault. After the Crash of 1929, people were asking the banks why they lent so profligately -- while ignoring the fact that thirty years earlier, people were castigating the banks for being too tight with their money, and they invented the Federal Reserve as the "lender of last resort" so that banks never be short on reserves. Thusly freed of constraints, they began to lend quite freely, and when the safer credit market reached saturation, they started lowering the credit bar, letting people borrow to put their money into the stock market or some other such popular investments... until reality reasserted itself and the artificially inflated demand for those investments dried up. (Sound familiar, homeowners?)
After that, the protectionists and anticapitalists in general had their way with Smoot Hawley and the New Deal, ultimately succeeding in turning the Crash into the Depression.
As you can see (if your eyes were open), on the contrary -- this IS a philosophical issue WITH real-world effects. The danger we face does not come from freedom of trade -- which, as a form of association, deserves the same protection as other freedoms -- but from the usual interventionist sources. Manipulation of the money and credit supply is a function of government, not free traders.
How is this only +2 6 days out? ... no mod points for me to use :-(