The American company Solar Aero Research has created a turbine without Fuller blades. According to the company, the invention is compact and low-cost - 1/3 cheaper than classic wind turbines of the same power.

The wind turbine is based on a modified Tesla turbine(Tesla turbine), invented in 1913 to generate energy from steam or compressed air. Tesla Turbine- These are many thin metal disks separated by small gaps. The flow of working fluid or gas comes from the outer edge of the disks and passes through the gaps to the center, twisting and entraining the disks themselves due to the boundary layer effect. In the center the flow exits through an axial hole.

In the Fuller Wind Turbine (Tesla turbine) the discs are separated by wing-shaped spacers - this improves flow and creates additional torque on the shaft. The turbine itself is installed in a box that captures air to force its flow onto the rotating disks.

And while it's becoming more and more common to see solar panels on rooftops, residential wind turbines are still a fairly rare sight. If Rotterdam-based tech company The Archimedes can prove the viability of its...

And while it's becoming more and more common to see solar panels on rooftops, residential wind turbines are still a fairly rare sight. If Rotterdam-based technology company The Archimedes can prove the viability of its development, the household landscape may soon be about to change. On May 27, the company officially unveiled its Liam F1 Urban Wind Turbine, which it claims has a power output of 80 percent of its theoretical maximum. This is quite a bold statement, considering that most commercial wind turbines have power that averages between 25 and 50 percent of the technology maximum.

The turbine weighs 75 kg (165 pounds), has a diameter of 1.5 meters (5 feet), and certainly doesn't look like a typical wind turbine. Its shape resembles a nautilus and a screw pump, invented by the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse.

This form factor reportedly results in minimal mechanical resistance, allowing the turbine to spin freely and silently - noise from the blades is the main obstacle to installing turbines on rooftops. In addition, the turbine is designed to always be downwind for maximum results.

Along with its promise that the turbine is able to achieve 80 percent of Betz's law limit, Archimedes claims that The Liam F1 generates an average of 1,500 kilowatt-hours of energy per year, at a wind speed of 5 m/s, which represents half the power required average household. Needless to say, it will be interesting to see what independent testing has to say about this. The company says it has tested The Liam F1 more than 50 times to confirm its effectiveness and has already sold 7,000 turbines in 14 countries.


The wind turbine, according to the creators, will become significantly more efficient than most existing wind turbines

However, the Liam F1 Urban Wind Turbine will only be officially available for sale from July 1st. However, the prices are already known today - on the company's official website there is an announcement that their cost will be €3999 (about $5450).


Liam F1 Urban Wind Turbine in action

The invention relates to the field of renewable energy and can be used to convert the kinetic energy of an air flow into mechanical and electrical energy. A constant air flow wind power plant includes a plurality of wind power units containing wind wheels with an electric generator, a heating element and a wind tunnel. Wind wheels with an electric generator are located in underground tunnels connected to a tower containing gas burners that create a constant air flow. The tower is made of polymer materials, equipped with stiffening ribs in the form of hoops and suspended on cables from the balloon. A drum with blades is mounted on the tower at the mouth of the wind tunnel, installed with the ability to rotate and create a vacuum under the influence of horizontal air flows. The wind power plant is suitable for installation in hard-to-reach places and provides the possibility of uninterrupted power generation, as well as reducing noise and vibration impacts on the environment. 2 ill.

Drawings for RF patent 2504685

The invention relates to the field of renewable energy and can be used to convert the kinetic energy of an air flow into mechanical and electrical energy.

Relevance of the invention.

The problem of providing the Earth's inhabitants with energy is so urgent that it forces militarily powerful countries to forcibly redistribute non-renewable energy sources for their own purposes. Intelligent humanity compensates for the decrease in mineral resources by searching for alternative sources of energy.

Among the many alternative renewable energy sources, wind energy is very attractive.

The results of research by American power engineers are impressive, according to the data obtained, even taking into account all the errors and low efficiency (conversion of kinetic wind energy into mechanical energy at the level of 39-42% and conversion of mechanical energy into electrical energy at the level of 90-94%), wind power plants can provide energy to the entire Earth .

Wind energy is developing at a particularly fast pace of 25-30% per year. By 2012, the installed capacity of wind power plants in the world should approach 160 GW.

Advantages and disadvantages of wind energy.

Advantages: Environmentally friendly form of energy. Electricity production using wind turbines is not accompanied by emissions of CO2 and other gases. Wind power plants take up little space and easily fit into any landscape, and also perfectly combine with other types of economic use of territories.

Wind energy, unlike fossil fuels, is inexhaustible. Wind energy is the best solution for hard-to-reach places. Disadvantages: instability. Instability lies in the inability to obtain the required amount of electricity. A windmill works like a sailboat as long as there is wind. Relatively low power output. Wind generators are significantly inferior in electricity generation to a diesel generator, which leads to the need to install several turbines at once. In addition, wind turbines are inefficient at peak loads. High cost: The cost of a plant producing 1 megawatt of electricity is $1 million.

Noise pollution, the noise produced by wind turbines, can cause disturbance to both wild animals and people living nearby.

Windmills cause low-frequency vibrations that affect human health.

The main disadvantage of these wind turbines is downtime due to the lack of a constant wind flow.

No wind - no electricity. Please spend what you have accumulated.

There are many wind turbines with different designs of wind wheels and wind turbines.

Designers have successfully eliminated some of the shortcomings of wind turbines. The Fuller Wind Turbine, a bladeless wind turbine, is based on a slightly modified Tesla turbine, invented in 1913.

A Tesla turbine is a collection of many thin metal disks separated by small gaps. The flow of working fluid or gas comes from the outer edge of the disks and passes through the gaps to the center, twisting and entraining the disks themselves due to the boundary layer effect. In the center, the flow exits through the axial hole.

At altitude, as is known, the wind blows stronger than at the surface of the earth. British architects David Amold and Alexa Ratzlaff propose creating special skyscrapers, the main purpose of which will be the generation of wind energy - the wind flow should be accelerated along the helical ribs of the building and fed to wind turbines located on the roof of the skyscraper.

The project is interesting, but has not yet been recreated even on models. As the air flow moves, it hums; many wind turbines on the roof of a skyscraper also generate infrasonic waves when their blades operate, which are dangerous to human health. How to live in such a house?

This project can be taken as the ideological basis of our prototype, as an attempt to use constantly operating air flows at higher altitudes; of course, installing wind turbines on the roofs of residential premises is highly undesirable.

A thermal vortex power plant is known, which contains a pipe with a vortex generator, wind wheels mounted on a vertical shaft, and an electric generator. The power plant is equipped with an additional vortex generator, deflector, and air heating system. The wind wheels are installed in a pipe, and the wings of the wind wheels are located in the zone of vortex air flow. The great advantage of this invention is the generation of a constant air flow, which will prevent downtime of the windmill.

The disadvantages are as follows.

The principle of a conventional stove, in the pipe of which a wind wheel is installed. The novelty is that to increase thrust, the upward air flow, which arises due to the temperature difference between the bottom and top of the pipe, is set into a vortex motion, which, according to the authors, should significantly increase the power and speed of the air flow.

It is doubtful that the vortex dynamic movement of the air flow will have a beneficial effect on the wings of a wind wheel or on the blades of a wind turbine.

You won’t get more thrust on a short section of pipe this way, and won’t all the electricity from the windmill be used to heat the air? And most importantly, if there is no heating, then there is no traction, which means the windmill will be idle (if fuel is not delivered or repair work is done on the heater). The fuel can be used more efficiently in conventional electric generators.

We accepted this invention as a prototype.

The purpose of the proposed invention is to increase the efficiency of a wind power plant with a constant air flow.

To create a constant air flow in the pipe, two conditions must be met:

The presence of a temperature gradient, atmospheric pressure or air density at the ends of the pipe;

The presence of the same air gradients inside the pipe relative to the environment.

The atmospheric pressure gradient at the ends of the pipe can be increased by increasing its length from several hundred meters to several kilometers, up to the upper boundary of the troposphere of 10-18 km.

To increase the pressure gradient inside the pipe, it is proposed to install a wind drum with blades at the mouth of the pipe, in which, when it rotates under the influence of horizontal air flows, according to Bernoulli's law, air rarefaction occurs, which creates additional thrust.

To heat the air inside the pipe, it is proposed to use gas burners installed on a tower at the mouth of the wind tunnel.

To reduce noise and vibration, it is proposed to place wind wheels with electric generators in underground tunnels.

These proposals should improve the efficiency of the wind farm.

The proposed constant air flow wind power plant includes a plurality of wind power plants containing wind wheels with an electric generator, a heating element and a wind tunnel,

characterized in that the wind wheels with an electric generator are located in underground tunnels connected to a tower in which gas burners are located. On the tower at the mouth of the wind tunnel, made of polymer materials with stiffeners in the form of hoops and suspended on cables to the balloon, there is mounted a drum with blades, installed with the ability to rotate and create a vacuum under the influence of horizontal air flows.

If the drum design is successful and there is wind, the thrust it creates in the wind tunnel will be sufficient to operate the power plant and the burners will not need to be turned on, and their joint operation will increase the efficiency of wind turbines.

Wind turbines with wind wheels or turbines that comply with technical and economic calculations and environmental ecology may be acceptable as wind power plants. A wind tunnel with stiffeners in the form of polymer hoops is suspended on cables to a balloon, which is kept from moving by the same cables using ground-based automatic tensioning devices.

Under the influence of wind lateral loads, the polymer sleeve can bend, which will not affect the performance of the wind turbine. the wind tunnel should have a length of several hundred meters or several kilometers, based on technical capabilities.

A strong air flow occurs inside the wind tunnel due to the heating of the air by gas burners, the pressure drop at its ends and the acceleration of the flow when the drum rotates. Significant loads on the wind tunnel walls are expected.

Of the variety of polymers, carbon fiber reinforced plastics are the most suitable under extreme conditions. The filler in these polymer composites is carbon fibers, which are obtained from synthetic and natural fibers based on cellulose, acrylonitrile copolymers of petroleum and coal tar pitches, etc.

Based on carbon fibers and a carbon matrix, composite carbon-graphite materials are created that can withstand temperatures up to 3000 degrees in inert or reducing environments for a long time. Carbon fiber reinforced plastics are very light and, at the same time, durable materials. For example, a polymer of this class, called “Hypol”, has the following parameters: operating temperature up to 2000 degrees, chemical inertness to oxidizing environments, does not burn, is 1.5 times lighter than aluminum and is very durable. The latest development of Russian scientists is of interest - the polymer CARAFFIN, which has special and exotic properties. For this development, Russian scientists received the Nobel Prize in 2010.

Carbon graphite tubes can achieve a strength 50 times that of steel.

Carbon thin films produced from these polymers can

be used as the walls of an internal wind tunnel.

Grilles and meshes of air intake filtration devices can be made from the same materials.

The material for balloons is usually elastomers, i.e. natural or synthetic rubbers. Rubber has the ability to reversibly stretch up to 900%. The same materials can also be used to make cables laid along the walls of the wind tunnel, with the help of which the structure is attached to the balloons.

The lower part of the tower is made in the form of a diffuser that compresses the air flow.

Scientific equipment (for the test period), sensors, video cameras, video and telemetric information transmitters are fixed at different levels of the wind tunnel.

Figure 1 shows a side cross-sectional view of a wind power plant; Fig.2 - top view of the power plant,

1 - balloon, 2 - gondola with instrumentation, 3 - cable, 4 - tensioner, 5 - wind tunnel, 6 - drum with blades, 7 - embankment, 8 - air intake with filter, 9 - wind power plant (wind wheels with an electric generator), 10 - tunnel, 11 - diffuser, 12 - stiffeners, 13 - gas burners, 14 - tower, 15 gas pipeline.

Progress of installation work.

They choose a place unsuitable for industrial and agricultural use. They build tunnels with air intakes and a tower with a diffuser. Wind wheels with electric generators are installed in the tunnels and this structure is covered with earth. A drum with blades rotating on ball bearings is installed on the tower.

It is easy to transport the assembled balloon, reels with polymer film and hoop arcs, as well as tensioners with a wound cable to the installation site.

The balloon 1 is brought into working condition, a gondola 2 is attached to the tensioning devices 4, which is equipped with control and measuring equipment and slowly lifted into the air. Sections of a wind tunnel 5 with stiffeners 12 in the form of polymer hoops are attached to the tensioned cables 3. As the pipe grows due to the joining of its sections, the balloon rises upward.

In parallel with this work, a controller, inverter, automatic transfer switch, transformer and power line interface are installed inside the electrical substation building. A ground monitoring station and a repeater are installed for automatic monitoring and control of the electrical substation from a distance.

Electricity from the generators is supplied via cable to the controller, which controls the entire power system of the station. Next, the energy is transformed and supplied through the interface to the power lines of the national network.

To supply energy to the devices of the power plant itself and nearby monitoring devices, an inverter and a transfer switch are used. ATS allows you to switch the power supply to an object when a wind power plant is stopped (repair, maintenance) to other installations or mountains. circuit.

Since the power plant is automatic, all its parameters and video observations are transmitted through a repeater to a data collection point in the regional mountain power grid.

The proposed wind power plant is simple, and therefore low-cost and economically beneficial. It is unpretentious in choosing a location - it is also suitable in hard-to-reach conditions. She is not afraid of the absence of wind or its strong gusts.

Wind power plants hidden in underground tunnels do not create unnecessary noise and vibration impacts on the environment and can operate near populated areas. The device is convenient for maintenance of the wind tunnel itself; it is enough to pull the balloon to the ground with tension devices.

The design of a wind power plant does not imply restrictions on the length and diameter of the wind tunnel, on the number of installed wind power plants, and therefore on its productivity.

CLAIM

A wind power plant with a constant air flow, including a plurality of wind power plants containing wind wheels with an electric generator, a heating element and a wind tunnel, characterized in that the wind wheels with an electric generator are located in underground tunnels connected to a tower in which gas burners are located, on the tower in at the mouth of the wind tunnel, made of polymer materials with stiffening ribs in the form of hoops and suspended on cables to the balloon, a drum with blades is mounted, installed with the ability to rotate and create a vacuum under the influence of horizontal air flows.