A vertical axis wind turbine that doesn't need the prevailing wind! How do they do that?

I guess you probably don't

need

me to give you any clues as to what this thing is. Admittedly, you don't see many of them with flashy green blades or whatever nonsense sticking out of the back, but you know, it's a

wind

turbine

, right? And their older brothers and sisters are now a fairly regular site in many of the countries where you good people are watching this from. Generally speaking, all adult versions have a very tall mast and three blades, attached to a central nacelle with a heavy-duty gear system inside to translate the rotational kinetic energy of the blades into useful electrical energy through a generator.

They are part of a subcategory called horizontal

axis

wind

turbine

s or HAWTs. But

they

are not the only way to obtain electrical energy from the wind. There is another subcategory called

vertical

axis

wind turbines or VAWTs. These things are extremely popular among the DIY enthusiast community, many of whom have installed rudimentary versions in their yards or gardens to provide useful power to their homes. Now, a new company has taken the basic concept of

vertical

access turbines to create a business model designed to operate even when there is no

prevailing

wind. So how do

they

do that?

Hello and welcome to Just Have a Think. The science of wind turbine dynamics and efficiency is practically an entire field of technical expertise in itself. There have been all sorts of different approaches and designs over the years, all aimed at achieving optimal overall performance. Vertical axis turbines or VAWTS tend to fall into one of two subcategories. Savonius turbines like this one. or Darrieus turbines like these. And on YouTube you'll find dozens of very entertaining DIYers who have cut up oil drums and various other items to produce their own homemade power generators. However, when it comes to commercial grid-scale wind turbines, there are several reasons why horizontal-axis turbines have generally been favored over vertical-axis ones.

At those kinds of enormous dimensions, the early development prototypes of VAWT systems proved to be less efficient, and in the days before we had novel composite materials, VAWTs also proved to be less reliable, and turbine blades tended to shear with constant changing directional forces. of the wind. In-depth comparisons between HAWT and VAWT are beyond the scope of this video, but if you want to delve deeper into it, I highly recommend going to my YouTube friend Rosie Barnes' channel where you can find two excellent videos explaining the Pros and cons of each type of turbine. And you can go directly to the first of those videos by clicking somewhere there.

However, VAWTs have some advantages. They are obviously much more compact than HAWTs and can take energy from the wind no matter what direction it comes from. HAWTs must have an additional mechanical configuration inside the tower called the YAW system, which converts the turbine to the

prevailing

wind so the blades can continue spinning. Vertical axis turbines therefore have the potential to provide very useful power in more urban environments where space is at a premium. However, designing a vertical axis wind turbine that

doesn

't necessarily require the wind to blow may seem like a bit of a crazy task, especially for a commercial company.

But that's exactly what a new British company called Alpha 311 plans to do by installing its turbines on motorway lampposts, bridges and roadside buildings, effectively collecting wasted airflow produced by passing vehicles. The company was founded in 2018 by business partners Barry Thompson and John Sanderson. After researching existing studies on the potential of turbines on highways, they realized that the focus was generally on placing the turbines right on top of streetlights, where they would gain no benefit from oncoming traffic. or in building a completely new infrastructure on top of the hardware. that was already there, which of course always turned out to be cost prohibitive.

So the initial concept that Alpha 311 pursued was to retrofit existing infrastructure with low-level turbines that would take advantage of traffic airflow. And they thought that would probably provide enough power just to light the lamps on top of the pole that the turbines would be connected to. But when its working prototype was formally evaluated by the Thermofluids Institute here in the UK, even excluding prevailing wind conditions and assuming there would be no traffic between 10 p.m. m. and 7 a.m. m., the results still showed much more electricity generation potential than originally anticipated. The A311 turbine blades begin rotating at an airflow speed as low as 1.2 meters per second.

Typical average highway traffic speeds of 60 miles per hour produce a residual airflow of 5.4 meters per second, which is approximately 12 miles per hour. At that speed, each turbine has a generating capacity of just over 2.5 kilowatts with an efficiency of 30%, or power coefficient to be more precise. Performance calculations were based on a 5.4 mile stretch of the M2 motorway in the south east of England. Using Department of Transportation data for hourly traffic flow rates, the analysis showed that a single turbine will produce an average daily power generation of just under six kilowatt hours. And that particular stretch of highway has capacity for 410 turbines, so the total annual electricity generation along that section was just over 860 megawatt hours.

Which is definitely worth having. The turbines are made from durable recycled composite materials and have a hollow internal sleeve designed to fit very easily around existing poles. Each unit will have a height of up to two meters and will be extremely light, weighing between three and a half and eight kilograms, depending on the model. This not only improves efficiency, but also makes them extremely easy to install. The blades themselves will be partially covered to ensure optimal energy harvesting from airflows in both directions and to avoid any cancellation interference. Unlike horizontal axis turbines, the Alpha 311 turbine does not

need

a bulky YAW system because it can use airflow from any direction, and it also does not have a heavy gear system, just a small, elegant static magnetic stator housed in the base of the unit with a stainless steel.

Steel rotor inside that is attached directly to the base of the turbine. As the rotor rotates inside the stator, it generates an electrical current that is sent to a charge controller through the wiring that already exists to supply power to the light pole. The charge controller then sends that current through an inverter and back to the local grid with much lower transmission losses than other remotely located power sources. The space allocated for the magnetic stator also houses a central array for collecting data from sensors that can be mounted on the light pole, meaning Alpha's system can also monitor air quality, weather conditions and traffic statistics, all of which can be sent through an Internet of Things, or IOT, gateway to monitor stations in real time over a 4G or 5G wireless connection.

Now, you super smart, technically minded types out there might be thinking that all that seemingly free energy comes from vehicles that require energy to move in the first place, and in the vast majority of cases, at least today, In any case, that energy will have come from fossil fuels in the form of diesel or oil. But all of those vehicles are punching a hole in the air and causing a flow of air around them, regardless of whether there is a turbine, a building, or anything else on the side of the road, and that airflow is essentially wasted energy.

Therefore, incorporating it into the blades of a turbine that can drive a generator to produce electricity is a smart use of already existing resources. which will be located in the round towers surrounding the 02 center in east London. After that, Alpha 311 will supply 54 turbines to a New York development called Green Asphalt. The medium-term aim is to install these turbines on motorways and main roads across the UK and the rest of the world, but Alpha 311 also has long-term aspirations beyond that. Although the performance figures quoted are based on traffic airflow, the turbines obviously perform equally well in prevailing wind conditions, and an obvious secondary application for compact, lightweight turbines like these are telecommunications masts.

There are hundreds of thousands of such things around the world, allowing our mobile phones to work wherever we are. A typical 5G mast uses about seven kilowatt hours of energy each day. One of these turbines installed on each of those masts will provide almost all the power they need, removing a significant load from our national grids. And as long as the relevant regulations are followed, there is no reason why smaller versions of these turbines cannot be installed in homes, possibly even in conjunction with solar power and battery storage to provide a much broader time window of electricity generation. energy for the head of the family.

That kind of system would lift many people, even here in the UK, out of energy poverty. And in developing countries it would be yet another option to consider for people living in remote off-grid areas, along with solar and micro-hydro that we saw in a recent video. It's very early days and just getting into first production, and I know one of the criticisms these startups get is that they're unproven and may not hit the numbers they predict. And I understand it. It's a perfectly reasonable challenge. But companies like Alpha 311, and many others around the world, are working toward the same basic end goal, which is to develop functional alternatives to the current dominance of fossil fuels in our power grids.

The Alpha 311 facilities will never replace onshore or offshore wind turbines and are not designed to do so, but they can provide a very valuable complementary energy source that will improve the diversity of renewable energy inputs to those grids, and for that reason, I part, I think they should be applauded. However, there is no doubt that you have your own views on this case. If so, or if you work in related industries and have information you can share, please head to the comments section below and leave your thoughts there. But that's all for this week. Thanks, as always, to the amazing people who support this channel through Patreon and help me keep the video content independent and ad-free.

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