I don't understand how they can have no moving parts?
It uses a similar effect to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptYrbQGk6DQ
ie vortex shedding. There are moving parts, but the movement is much smaller and more confined.
Wind Power Without the Mills
11–20 of 60 posts
Re: Wind Power Without the Mills
#12Are there any numbers on how much it generates compared to a traditional design? I imagine it generates less electricity but it costs less so there's a trade-off.
Re: Wind Power Without the Mills
#13One of the great things about wind turbines today is that they capture power over the entire disk of wind the blades touch.
I suppose using this system means blocking the wind with something akin to a forest, with a small space between "artificial trees".
Re: Wind Power Without the Mills
#14Also relevant are these awesome wind kits google is developing: http://www.google.com/makani/
parent has a typo, it's meant to say 'awesome wind kites'.
Re: Wind Power Without the Mills
#15Again? AGAIN? Another "no blades! save the birds!" technology that's little more than a concept.
There are constantly amazing technologies just around the corner that will definitely totally be awesomely better than existing 3 bladed horizontal axis wind turbine technology. And they'll always be less expensive than current technology somehow. Trust me, getting the cost right at this stage of the technology curve is almost impossible, and founders and technology developers are notoriously optimistic.
Yet they are always a few kW (this one is 4 kW) rather than 2 or 3 MW (a factor of 1000), and are always "just a few years away". And will never be a commercially successful product outside, perhaps, small scale demonstration and greenwashing projects.
We didn't get to the standard model of wind turbine by accident. It took decades of engineering and refinement. And yes, we still have a lot to learn. And yes the current technology has problems.
Re: Wind Power Without the Mills
#16Always found it odd that wind capture/generation shapes resembled centuries old windmills. Great to see some (expected) innovation in the space. With non-moving parts, no noise, and won't sent people into epileptic shock around sunrise/sunset, it looks like a winner. (if you've never driven past a windfarm in the morning or evening, the flashing is incredibly irritating).
Let me do a quick word substitution.
> If you've never driven past trees in the morning or evening, the flashing is incredibly irritating.
Shadow flicker is a siting and operations problem. It's based on geometry (sun angles and turbine locations), wind conditions (turbine direction) and weather conditions (cloudiness). If we consider residences, schools, churches, and so on as discrete shadow receptors, flicker can be minimized through careful siting of the machines, and eliminated at those sites through programmatic controls (curtailment).
Re: Wind Power Without the Mills
#17If they have managed anywhere even close to their claimed cost reductions then this is very cool. Wind is already on par with oil in terms of EROEI.
If oil were the primary fuel for electricity generation, you'd have a solid point.
Assuming that we were to compare it to natural gas, for which you may have used oil as a proxy, this provides some substantiation to your claim: - http://www.theoildrum.com/node/1863
But the calculations here don't reflect that peak power generation doesn't reflect peak demand. So, we've looking at adding in battery's costs too.
At the end of the day, if a greedy capitalist can make a bigger buck (with or without government subsidies) with wind than they can with coal or natural gas, they will.
Given that the efforts to bring new capacity on-line fluctuate (dramatically!) with the comings and goings of government subsidies, my guess is that they aren't quite the competitive economic wonder, at this point, that they are touted to be.
YMMV.
Re: Wind Power Without the Mills
#18I think you have to separate joy of the tech from practical matters here.
Regarding the practical matters, it looks like they are three orders of magnitude from being on par with the three-blade vertical design.
So while this idea may be worthwhile in some niches like mentioned in the article, it's currently not a replacement for the giant, towering, 3 MW and up turbines erected these days.
And just like other wind-turbine replacement ideas (like kites or vertical-axis designs, but there are many more, just check Wikipedia), they probably never will. As I understand it, part of the beauty of the three-blade design is that by scaling the blade length linearly, you get a quadratic gain (pi r^2 area swept) in energy harvested.
Re: Wind Power Without the Mills
#19The problem with these things is always in the scaling up. Either things don't scale linearly, or you run into some fundamental limit where the tech doesn't yet exist to solve it. Even if the bigger systems don't pan out, it's still cool and useful.
I wonder what's the size of their prototype? Hard to tell from the picture.
Re: Wind Power Without the Mills
#20I have repelled (using Industrial Rope Access) off hundreds of multi-megawatt Wind Turbines on $1B+ wind farms around the world to inspect and repair the 13+ ton fiberglass blades and wanted to give my 2 cents. [A clarification: Wind Turbines generate electricity, Wind Mills mill flour. It's a small but important detail.]
Operation & Maintenance expense is my biggest issue with new technology. I have met many design engineers that have never been inside of a nacelle or even visited a wind farm. In the real world generators and blades break, hurricanes, lightning, shit happens. Cranes are extremely expensive and a 2MW "mast" that can compete with today's technology is going to be crazy tall. How to repair a lightning cable? Cranes are over $10k per day and cables take a few days to fix.
Today there is a 26 story ladder in the interior of the support tower that people climb up to fix hardware in the nacelle. To inspect the blades we then rig our anchors to the generator, pop out the top hatch and repel over the nose cone and down onto a blade in the "down" position. The only specialized hardware needed is anchors, carabiners, ropes, harness and helmet.
Vortex Bladeless would be impossible to inspect and repair using this method, yes drones are great for inspection, but what about repairing a stress crack on the tip? You would need a crazy tall crane that is even more expensive and with cranes the wind speeds need to be a fraction that of Industrial Rope Access. This means your available repair days are even less and the turbine has to be shut down for longer for the fix to occur.
I am all for new technology and crowd financing, but there are many practical obstacles this team needs to overcome in the design phase to build a product that can actually scale in the real world.
Also, feel free to AMA if you have specific wind turbine questions.