www.devicedaily.com Jet engine inspired FloDesign boosts wind turbine output Green Tech CNET News I got this off of cnet.com. Thanks from Martin LaMonica from cnet news. Here is the article: news.cnet.com I have never liked wind turbines, because they are noisy, ugly, and it takes 10000 of them to equal the power of a medium sized coal plant. This new design is a major improvement in my opinion.
Who am I ?
Hi, I’m Erik Astrand and the man behind this site.
My story? I am about to be 50 and all my life I have been interested in technical things. Not sure if the special interest for the wind, and how to use the wind, started when I as a 5 year old boy and got my first sail dinghy.
Anyway, wind power and to build my own wind generator was a dream for several years. I studied many websites and also bought many courses before I finally built my own windmill. This site is about that journey and you will also find some more general articles about wind power.
Enjoy! and check out the about me page to read more.
exellent presentation and good design – how big of a turbine is needed for 10 kw.
When does it become reality?
This really looks like an interesting design and I hope it progresses well into the testing phase. But the marketing people should check their script a little more closely. They say that traditional turbines extract 50% of the potential energy of the wind, but FloDesign extracts 3 to 4 times as much. Well by my calculation that is 150% to 200% of the wind energy. Aside from being impossible it is well about the 59% Betz limit.
@JohnCBriggs the vortex it produces multiplies the amount of potential energy extracted by the wind like a tesla coil does for electricity.
@bornlikethis38 Nothing multiplies the amount of energy available in a system. It is a violation of the law of conservation of energy. Perhaps their design is more efficient (perhaps not) but in any case, it is not 150% to 200% efficient. I am sure they know that but the marketing guys got carried away.
@JohnCBriggs Creating a vortex multiplies the power output because it increases the wind pressure inside the turbine like a tesla coil takes 120 volts and turns into 50,000 volts by going from a large coil to small coil.
@bornlikethis38 Let’s see if I can explain this in 484 characters. System can multiply force (like a seesaw), or voltage (like a transformer) or pressure (apparently with this wind turbine. But something is always lost, like distance (seesaw), or current (like a transformer), or flow rate (wind turbine). This is because energy (and power) must be conserved. So this wind turbine does NOT multiply power output. Nothing does.
@JohnCBriggs ultimately it does provide more power, because the turbine multiplies the work powered by the energy in the wind. your disputing their number saying they get 4 times the amount of electricity than a conventional massive inefficient turbine, i don’t dispute that, i’ll trust they weren’t lying
@bornlikethis38 Let’s start with the basics. The power in wind = 1/2 density *Area*Velocity^3. That is all the power available. In you want more power the only thing that can be changed is the swept area of the windmill blades. The density of the air or velocity of the wind cannot be changed. So the claim is that conventional wind turbines are 50% efficient. So the power extracted is 0.25*density*area*velocity^3. The power from the flodesign…
@JohnCBriggs is supposed to be 4X the conventional wind turbine This is 1.0*density*area*velocity^3. This is twice the energy that is available in the wind. Where did the energy come from? No matter how cleaver the design, no matter what marketing spin, nothing exceeds 100% efficiency. It does not matter what is in the box. The amount of power exiting the box (AC electricity) cannot exceed the amount of power entering the box (wind power).
@JohnCBriggs The turbine is obviously not over-unity, perhaps they’re using some sort or geometric sequence 4x 50% == (50% + 25% + 12.5% + 6.25% = 93.75%) to calculate efficiency. wikipedia states: “Large modern water turbines operate at mechanical efficiencies greater than 90%”, and such water turbines are similar in design to the flowdesigns turbine, so perhaps this is what they mean.
@Br1ckInTh3W4LL Thanks for trying to clarify the claim. While we are looking up things in Wikipedia, let me add in this one. “According to Betz’s law, no turbine can capture more than 59.3 percent of the kinetic energy in wind.”
OMG fucking awesome!
@JohnCBriggs According to Betzs law, no turbine can capture more than 59.3 percent of the kinetic energy in wind. In tests, WindTamer a second company claim to have turbines that do better than the 59.3 percent limit.
@arkivx1 OK here is the WindTamer quote “even exceeding the theoretical limit of efficiency of extracting power from the wind, the so called Betz limit of 59.3%, based on the swept area of the rotor.” The last part is the key “Swept area of the rotor”. They are applying the limit incorrectly. They need to apply the area of the duct, not the rotor. The whole argument is a little strange. Does the customer care if they have a 16 foot duct or 16 foot rotor?
@arkivx1 WindTamer does supply data. Using their data and the duct diameter (16 feet) rather than the rotor diameter (8 feet), I compute the efficiency at about 18%. This is typical for wind turbines of that size. If you compute using the rotor diameter, the pseudo-efficiency is 70%. But this is misleading. No one doubts that a duct works. The question is, is it better to purchase a huge duct or standard turbine if the efficiencies are similar.
@bornlikethis38
Betz limit is 59% so that’s the best they can do. I don’t believe that any large commercial turbine is less efficient than 15%. (probably more like 40%). Therefore I don’t buy the 4x efficiency number.
Faster spin = faster bearing wear
@arkivx1 “According to the company, this wind turbine will generate power at half the cost of conventional wind turbines thanks to its jet engine technology that overcomes the Betz limit for turbines. Regular wind turbines can capture 59.3 percent from wind’s energy, and this percentage was called the Betz limit. The problem is that almost half of the wind which approaches a turbine is deflected around the blades, not through them which means that almost half of the potential energy is lost.”
@sjh7132 “According to the company, this wind turbine will generate power at half the cost of conventional wind turbines thanks to its jet engine technology that overcomes the Betz limit for turbines. Regular wind turbines can capture 59.3 percent from wind’s energy, and this percentage was called the Betz limit. The problem is that almost half of the wind which approaches a turbine is deflected around the blades, not through them which means that almost half of the potential energy is lost.”
@bornlikethis38
That is misleading information from the company. When figuring the area of a turbine you should also include the shroud, in that case they won’t break Betz. It’s pretty much the same as having larger blades. But if their cost is lower per watt produced that’s really all that matters. It would be interesting to see if it’s true.