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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: 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.