Tuesday, July 03, 2007

New low impact wind turbine?

Attaching a traditional full sized wind turbine on the side of your house probably won't make you any friends, but it's possible that a new modular design by Graham Attey, an Australian engineer, might be slightly more acceptable to your neighbours.

CREDIT: Graeme Attey
Graeme Attey's design for a rooftop Wind Turbine

Resembling a scaled down and horizontally mounted Savonius turbine, the new design has no visible rotating blades and is relatively quiet. Attley has just been awarded funding from the Western Australia Sustainable Energy Development Office to further develop his new design.

3 comments:

  1. This is too good, therefore the powers that be will not let it go forward.

    Now. what if we put one of these on the roof of our battery powered automobile. Simply going forward could recharge the battery. We would never have to plug in again.

    Really, the day is coming when ideas like this will no longer be novel - they will mean survival.

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  2. Er, no, doesn't quite work like that, a turbine on a car roof will create far more drag, and therefore use far more extra power to push the car along, than would be gained from the turbine. You can't get energy from nowhere...

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  3. I see the turbine but not the generator.?
    How much torque does it get out of how much wind?
    How much wind is too much for it?
    I could believe that 5 of these might power a house sitting on the summit of Mt.Washington, but I dont think there is that much wind everywhere you might put a house.

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