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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."
Cats kill at least an order of magnitude more birds than windmills do.
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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.
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No. TFA states the new turbines cost half as much and can be spaced twice as dense as conventional blade style turbines. They capture 30% less energy than a conventional turbine, but considering you can put 2 in the same spot for roughly the same price as just one conventional turbine, you should get more energy for the same cost and land space.
In theory, lower total cost of ownership as well given the lack of moving parts to replace... but who knows what real-world issues the structure may see. Maybe the materials don't hold up as well as thought under heat, light, and vibration and will require maintenance or degrade their performance over time.