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Dec212009

Cool Mass. wind turbine design gets nod from Energy Secretary

Filed under Alternative energy by david brooks at 12:37 pm

There’s something about windmills that drives inventors crazy: Straight-ish blades spinning in a circle around a horizontal axis seems so old-fashioned; surely we can devise something cooler? Like a helix around a vertical axis! Or a funky-looking energy ball! Or magnets around the rim!

One funky-looking design got a heads-up in the climate conference in Copenhagen, reports Xconomy: It’s from FloDesign of Wilbraham, Mass. (whose Web site tells you nothing unless you log in). They are trying to create what looks like a jet turbine to better draw energy from wind. Energy Secretary Steven Chu praised it in Cophenhaben, and the firm has gotten an $8 million R&D grant to see if it can go from CAD pictures to reality.

Listening to the wind howl around my house last night, I had definite twinges of small-wind-power lust, tempered by my knowledge that small-scale wind power is very hard to do well. I do wish folks would develop a new system it feasible - and look cool, too, of course.

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    Yet another ducted fan windmill. I built one of these when I worked for Zephyr Wind Dynamo in Brunswick, Maine about the year 1975 or so. The owner of the company designed a ten foot diameter wheel surrounded by a 16 foot shroud that was supposed to concentrate the wind on the blades. The perimeter of the wheel had many high-strength magnets that acted on the coils outside of the rim to act as an alternator.
    We had some problems. First and most important, we soon realized that the weight of the shroud made pointing the machine into the wind difficult.
    Next, if the blades were simply made to be the same diameter of the shroud, we would get the same energy out without the weight and construction complexity of the shroud.
    The next problem was that with such a large diameter permanent magnet generator, cogging would keep the generator from turning from a dead stop. The attraction of the magnets to the coil pole pieces would lock the generator in one place. That was fixed by making the generator three phase (to start) and later six phase. That small offset in the coils greatly reduced the cogging with some additional electronics mostly consisting of another bridge rectifier for each phase.
    We built one machine, put it up and it sort of ran and generated some power. Throughout the industry, there was a need for a low speed generator that could be directly connected to hydro or wind powered systems. So, a reduction to two foot diameter, multi-phase generators became the product line. They were moderately successful, but I've never seen one in actual use.

    Earle Rich On the road headed south.
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    Perhaps - and I speak as somebody who knows nothing whatsoever about the topic - advances since then in materials (lighter and stronger) and turbines (more efficient) could make this possible.

    If nothing else, a good well-funded design that flops could prevent other people from wandering down a mistaken path.

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