Wired has a profile of Spanish company Vortex Bladeless and their unusual new wind turbine tech. "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." Instead of
relying on wind to push a propeller in a circular motion, these
turbines rely on vorticity
— how wind can strike an object in a particular way to generate
spinning vortices of air. Engineers usually try to avoid this — it's
what brought down the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
But this Spanish company designed the turbine computationally to have
the vortices occur at the same time along its entire height.
"In its
current prototype, the elongated cone is made from a composite of
fiberglass and carbon fiber, which allows the mast to vibrate as much as
possible (an increase in mass reduces natural frequency).
At the base
of the cone are two rings of repelling magnets, which act as a sort of
nonelectrical motor. When the cone oscillates one way, the repelling
magnets pull it in the other direction, like a slight nudge to boost the
mast's movement regardless of wind speed.
This kinetic energy is then
converted into electricity via an alternator that multiplies the
frequency of the mast's oscillation to improve the energy-gathering
efficiency."
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