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from the what-will-don-quixote-make-of-these dept.
It's no longer surprising to encounter 100-foot pinwheels spinning in the breeze as you drive down the highway. But don't get too comfortable with that view. A Spanish company called Vortex Bladeless is proposing a radical new way to generate wind energy that will once again upend what you see outside your car window.
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. But it goes about it in an entirely different way.
Instead of capturing energy via the circular motion of a propeller, the Vortex takes advantage of what's known as vorticity, an aerodynamic effect that produces a pattern of spinning vortices. Vorticity has long been considered the enemy of architects and engineers, who actively try to design their way around these whirlpools of wind. And for good reason: With enough wind, vorticity can lead to an oscillating motion in structures, which, in some cases, like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, can cause their eventual collapse.
Less efficient than traditional wind turbines, but quiet and don't kill birds.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Francis on Thursday November 19 2015, @07:05PM
It's unfortunate that the article was so completely lacking in details. I don't see anything in the article that talks about how the device converts those vortexes into electricity. I assume that the whole shaft doesn't rotate, but the article is rather light on the details.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 19 2015, @07:24PM
You expect actual facts from vaporware that is looking for investors? "Green energy" is one of today's buzzwords, so expect most players in the field to be selling snake oil.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday November 19 2015, @08:11PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 19 2015, @08:53PM
Don't forget to prefix it with a lowercase i and include the term cloud somewhere.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Thursday November 19 2015, @10:31PM
To be fair, most methods of converting mechanical energy into electricity involve magnets or electromagnets and methods that don't use magnetism, like rubbing fur on plastic, aren't widely used for anything beyond classroom demonstrations of static electricity, which is useful educationally, but not really for generating usable power.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by M. Baranczak on Thursday November 19 2015, @07:51PM
The article does talk about that. The shaft doesn't rotate, it flexes back and forth, and that motion is then converted to electricity.
Biggest problem I see is material fatigue. Building a tower that can bend over and over, for several decades, without breaking? I'm sure it can be done, but can it be done at a reasonable price?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 19 2015, @07:56PM
Literally every tall building or structure in the world bends over and over, for decades, without breaking.
Materials such as steel have something called a Fatigue Limit [wikipedia.org]. Cyclic stress will weaken the material, but only to a point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 19 2015, @10:53PM
There's an animation on the company's home page:
http://vortexbladeless.com/vortex1.ogg [vortexbladeless.com]
The wind will cause their device to oscillate (I've seen lamp posts do this in the wind). The oscillations will cause relative motion between a magnet and a coil of wire, of which one, presumably, will be anchored firmly to the ground and the other, presumably, will be attached to the vibrating pole. The resulting electricity, I suppose, they rectify and feed to an inverter—unless they've been clever enough to match the frequency of the oscillations with the mains frequency.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday November 19 2015, @11:16PM
From what I've seen, the idea is to have magnets on the shaft moving inside a coil of wire acting as an alternator.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday November 20 2015, @10:32AM
sudo mod me up