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Microwind Generator For Low Power Systems

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the welcome-to-sunday dept.

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.

3 of 243 comments (clear)

  1. Sub-100W generators are very interesting... by DamonHD · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...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/
  2. A bit more detail by AndroidCat · · Score: 4, Informative

    Shawn Frayne's Windbelt Wins Popular Mechanics 2007 Breakthrough Award

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    One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
  3. Not a Single Engineering Reply by BoRegardless · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.