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Wind Turbines With No Blades
An anonymous reader writes: Wired has a profile of Spanish company Vortex Bladeless and their unusual new wind turbine tech. "Their idea is the Vortex, a bladeless wind turbine that looks like a giant rolled joint shooting into the sky. The Vortex has the same goals as conventional wind turbines: To turn breezes into kinetic energy that can be used as electricity." Instead of relying on wind to push a propeller in a circular motion, these turbines rely on vorticity — how wind can strike an object in a particular way to generate spinning vortices of air. Engineers usually try to avoid this — it's what brought down the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. But this Spanish company designed the turbine computationally to have the vortices occur at the same time along its entire height. "In its current prototype, the elongated cone is made from a composite of fiberglass and carbon fiber, which allows the mast to vibrate as much as possible (an increase in mass reduces natural frequency). At the base of the cone are two rings of repelling magnets, which act as a sort of nonelectrical motor. When the cone oscillates one way, the repelling magnets pull it in the other direction, like a slight nudge to boost the mast's movement regardless of wind speed. This kinetic energy is then converted into electricity via an alternator that multiplies the frequency of the mast's oscillation to improve the energy-gathering efficiency."
If it works as well as hoped this will save a lot of
big birds from an early demise.
Big fans rotating like heck are an astounding challenge to keep intact
and maintain. Not that these will be any easier but "Big Bird's" yellow
feathers will be safer (one can hope).
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
This makes me wince. Vibration and oscillation are never good, it feels like something is going to fatigue and wear out very quickly.
They've taken a machine with moving parts, removed everything that moved, and made the entire machine move.
Progress?
Why does everything have to do with weed?
Probably because if you zoom in on the third one to the left of center you can see Tommy Chong trying to spark it up. ;-)
There’s enough interest, Suriol says, that he fields upward of 200 emails a day from people inquiring about the turbine.
How many of those are from bloggers and other online tech writers?
Seriously, though - this actually does look interesting. Current wind tech brings some pretty glaring issues along with the benefits.
#DeleteChrome
I sped read through the drivel (article) until I got to this and then quit reading.
So many words to say so little by someone who doesn't understand science.
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> Vortex Bladeless’s founders—David Suriol, David Yáñez, and Raul Ingeniero—
"Raul Ingeniero" literally means "Raúl, engineer"
Why does everything have to do with weed? It could be a pipe, a cigarette, but no it has to resemble a joint. -- Is Slashdot a bunch of potheads?
When you're stoned, you go with the flow. Joints are much easier to model using Blender (or similar programs) than complex structures like pipes and needles. The mockup in TFA is rather eerie - 80 foot high joints balanced over a moody desert scene. You half expect Johnnie Depp to come running on to the stage shooting randomly at non existent bats.
Maybe that will be in the trailer.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It doesn't look at all like a pipe or cigarette. It does look like cone-style joint. I've never seen one myself, but you can't deny the resemblance.
http://www.hightimes.com/watch...
Why are you uptight about weed? It's a much less destructive alternative to alcohol.
Is it indiegogo size, kickstarter size, or angel investor size?
Yes, but the majority of those cats eat the birds. I haven't seen a windmill that can do that.
Even if it were true that the cats eat the birds (and I'm not convinced that it is) why is that relevant? They aren't (usually) hunting birds out of actual need to eat and the bird is just as dead regardless of what happens to it later.
I wonder if windmill ground bird compost will be acceptable for organic farms. If so, it sounds like a win-win.
Perhaps you haven't looked at windmills up close recently but there isn't exactly a pile of dead birds sitting below them. Windmills are not a particularly severe danger to our avian friends.
420 feet?
Streisand effect: let's see how many mj references we're going to get now because of the AC's mini-rant. Conversely, perhaps he's a tokin' troll.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Airplanes that are subject to vibrations and oscillations all day every day have lifespans on the order of 50-70 years. Last time I flew on a plane, it was older than I was.
Vibration and oscillation can be engineered for, and as an engineer, you should know that...
Maybe that will be in the trailer.
Coming, This October...
"Field of Dreams 2"
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
My 2nd thought was that this looks like a field of dicks. It may be a way to win over powerful nimby types who look and find that there's something, er, aesthetically pleasing about them.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
"Ceci n'est pas une joint"
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Their first product is a 100W 9 foot version. I found that quite interesting if it can scale down to streetlight scale. Not sure if the movements are small vibrations or large scale oscillation but if you could use these to mount streetlights it sounds like in windy areas they should provide enough power to run the lights for free.
This is a Spanish company.
As everybody knows, the main danger for traditional wind turbines in Spain is a crazy luddite riding his horse.
He is usually followed by a small, fat man on a donkey.
Hence the motivation for building wind turbine without blades.
Star Trek, of course. http://en.memory-alpha.org/wik...
At first I was going to bitch about a completely irrelevant reference to marijuana smoking in the summary.
But then I looked at the picture, and now I want to knock one of them down and attempt to toke off of it.
Pipes and cigarettes aren't typically tapered in the manner of a joint (and these turbines).
And yes, Slashdot is a bunch of potheads. Smoke weed every day!
The correct technical term for a joint in this shape is "Camberwell Carrot".
This sig left unintentionally blank.
Newsreel footage of the disaster is well worth watching, if you haven't; you can easily find it on youtube. In fact, it was so impressive at the time that it was used as a cliffhanger in Atom Man vs. Superman, the second (and last) movie serial Columbia made about Superman.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
The lack of mechanical parts is really the big deal here. High tech maintenance is a killer when deploying power system to 3rd world country like Alabama.
Has anyone heard of these? They built a demonstration model in Chaska.
It basically looks like an enclosed tower with an opening at the top and a "tail" at the bottom. The web page says it tunnels moving air and utilizes the venturi effect to increase the wind velocity. The actual turbine is enclosed at the end of the "tail".
It claims to have a number of advantages -- extremely low cut-in speed (2 mph), no cut out speed, lower maintenance costs, multiple turbines per tower possible, and no external moving parts.
The web site says there are several projects commissioned, albeit somewhat smaller (200-400KW).
It looks interesting and since I've actually seen a full-size unit (the size of maybe a small water tower) I know it's not complete BS. It does kind of set off my bullshit meter a little, though, simply because if the design concept was so good I wouldn't every single wind generator look the same.
Cats kill at least an order of magnitude more birds than windmills do. [implication: it's not worth worrying about wind turbines killing birds]
Almost every time bird-killing wind turbines are discussed, someone posts this non-argument.
It's a bit badly formulated, but the argument isn't that much flawed.
- Indeed, although cats are a rather random example, there are TONS of human made things which kill a lot more birds than wind turbines. If you want to save birds, better concentrate on these bigger causes first.
The "birds" argument tries simply to say in a humoristic way: Even "putting hi-tech bird saving contraptions(tm)" (a.k.a.: bells on their collar) on house cats will be much more efficient than scratching your head about wind turbines.
More seriously: even if it is spectacular (because its a new technology, because these are big impressive devices, and because the bird "victims" tend to pile up in a limited place) wind turbine are far from the most dangerous things to birds.
I would strongly suspect (but don't have precise numbers) that pollution is among the highest bird-killing human-made factor. (But it's a lot less mind grabbing: we're used to polution, it's a boring subject for refular people. Also birds dead by it would be spread allover the region instead of forming a nice pile at the feet of the turbine).
Given that wind turbines tend to lower pollution (even more in countries that would otherwise burn fossils to produce their electricity), it might happen that the bird-killing machine would be actually saving birds life at the larger scale.
- Also there's another smaller factor not to forget:
Darwin's law, and evolution. Birds do adapt.
There's a very impressive example: glass. A few decades ago, our industry progress to the point of being able to produce huge glass pannels. Instead of small window, big glass walls started to appear. Problem: birds couldn't see or even notice the glass. You had accounts of lots of city birds hitting their head on glass walls. And poor city birds trapped inside big glass building (in the cafeteria) trying desperately to fly against this huge "invisible (to them) forcefield" (the glass wall).
Fast forward to now: there probably a couple of city birds happily living in your building's cafeteria. Feasting on left-overs, and hidden from predators.
There's such a huge advantage (avoid death, avoid getting lost, free shelter, free food, etc.) at slightly tweaking the visual system until glass become noticeable that city birds have evolved to the this point.
If it's so deadly to them, birds will probably slightly tweak their brains until able to grasp the concept of "big huge mass of turning metal" (it's not impossible it's totally within the realm of their capabilites). When you look at it, some members of the corvidae family have grasped the concept of cars as "big heavy metal box which blindly follow roads". They don't run away scared. The use car as nut opener: leave them on the road and wait patiently at the road side until a car smashes the nut open (whereas their great-gand-parents need to fly way up and crack them by dropping them from a high altitude onto a rock. Or onto the occasional bald greek theatrical author). Compared to that, grasping the concept of a wheel turbine is well within the realm of possibilities.
Let's apply well-known Slashdot troll NatasRevol's logic to other things:
- Heart disease kills at least an order of magnitude more people than diabetes. [implication: it's not worth worrying about diabetes killing people]
(Ob. car analogy: "Traffic incidents kill at least an order of magnitude more poeple than car collisions")
Uh. No. You're completely bogus on this one.
YA*N*AMD, whereas I*A*AAMD.
With diabetes, in the long term, the things that most likely will kill you (baring an accidental hypo glycemia due to treatment error) is the slow and progressive destruction of the blood vessel.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The only way you get power from the wind is by 'blocking' it by some device, like a propellor, vertial wing.
The power of the device depends on the area of wind that it 'blocks', with a normal turbin it's a circle, with a vertical version it's a square.
1. Bird death are caused by blocking or intercepting the path of the bird
2. To generate the same power these bladeless turbines need to block the same area
3. As buildings are the biggest bird killers, even while they are static objects it is likely these blades will kill as much as normal turbines..
Ergo : Distraction.
Is cool.
I know I'm going to get disappointed though when somebody has something to complain about it.
So they're not half as efficient as turbines, meaning you need more than twice as many of them to produce the same power, but they "should" be quite a bit cheaper than turbines due to their simplicity. At best it sounds like they're a draw with current methods, at worst they're a step back. About the only real advantage seems to be that they may prevent the few birds/bats kills by turbines from taking place and may help quell SOME of the NIMBY complaints (noise, blade shadows).
Perhaps if you learned to hunt better, kitty wouldn't feel the need to drag so much stuff in. See #1 of Matthew Hayden's 6 Adorable Cat Behaviors With Shockingly Evil Explanations.
I believe the industry term is 'spliff'.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Oh, please, yes. I really hope this design turns out to work well. I'd love to have a wind energy mechanism that puts an end to the "kills birds" and "strobe light" arguments against wind turbines. I imagine that it's probably quieter, too.
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
Or, in this case, you had me at "Giant Rolled Joint'. Count me in.
Sheesh... you read the article and it sounds like a bunch of crackpot science with fluid dynamics terms thrown around. The key word here is vortex shedding shedding, which will cause the stack to oscillate. This is the energy they are capturing. Many smokestacks have spirals to break up the vortices which would otherwise cause fatigue.
Why the fuck do the words "Tacoma Narrows Bridge." simply link to the wired article again?
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I'm curious: how does a Perl script smoke weed?
The arugment OTOH could be "those with a brain allowing them to see glass pane, do get a survival and reproduction advantage, those who don't , have a higher chance of dying before reproduction thus the glass window generate a natural selection of birds". Also I am doubtful of that. I do not recall any study showing that bird start to see reflective surface as glass pane rather than continuation of their habitat. Would you have a cite ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
It may be good to fly one in the air.
http://www.altaerosenergies.com/bat.html
From the article, Suriol says, it’s pretty cool-looking. “It looks like asparagus,” he says. “It’s much more natural.”
The arugment OTOH could be "those with a brain allowing them to see glass pane, do get a survival and reproduction advantage, those who don't , have a higher chance of dying before reproduction thus the glass window generate a natural selection of birds".
"...and random mutation add to genetic variability, feeding in more differences that could be furter selected this way". /. we all know how evolution actually works (no "big plans" or "intention" involved).
Thus as condition shifts, a new local minima can be reached.
Yup on
Also I am doubtful of that. I do not recall any study showing that bird start to see reflective surface as glass pane rather than continuation of their habitat. Would you have a cite ?
Hmm... I've come accross some statistics being done this way (proportion of death of birds hitting their head on glass diminishing in the bird population, etc.). No actual bird-brain studies.
Haven't the reference at hand right now. Will come back to you if I find them again.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
But if a few hundred California condors die to windmills, then we have serious problems.
Yes you'll have *a* serious problem. But this problem isn't specifically the wind mills.
The problem is the whole range of human activities that drove their population down to the point that a hundred of dying condors is significant.
(I suspect, mainly massive changes in their natural habitat, big disruption of the ecological equilibrium, esp. in regards of the prey they usually feed on. Probably environmental pollution. Maybe a little bit of hunting too.)
Banning windmills is only a surface problem. The few condors that might die because of them probably won't. But it doesn't solve the actual main big problem that condors are endangered.
Protected wildlife reservation might help more, for example.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
And that scare about birds is bollocks.
Whines from people who hate birds but hate renewables more.
Cheech and Chong believe these Spanish guys roll really skinny joints.
Well may be it can be true but it takes some explaining. The central problem I see is the crossection is smaller. SO how can it extract energy from wind that does not pass through its crossection? For that to be true then it implies that somehow the energy depleted wind is sucking energy from the surrounding windfeild as it passes by. I could imagine this is potentially possible. For example if you were to picture the wind like water piling up behind your hand in stream then it's the up stream water pushing on the water stopped in front of your hand that generates the force on your hand. So you are coupled to distant water. But the same is true of a regular windmill, and it has a larger crossection (hand). So it's not simple to work out how it manages to extract only 30% less energy per machine.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The main problem I see with this is area of wind captured.
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I know very little about windmills so this may sound naive, but it seems to me that this might be the sort of thing you could put in your backyard: it's tall, but with a fairly small footprint. On the other hand, if it's vibrating all the time it will create sound waves: I wonder how loud it gets?
We're looking at this all wrong. Windmills should be as lethal to birds as possible!
Hence I propose attaching rows of cats to the blades of the windmill. Whatever the blades don't kill, the cats will.
Next enhancement will be to equip the cats with laser beams.