BBC Focus Magazine

[Healerman]

I came across this rather intriguing video of a new wind turbine design. It ia alleged to be 30% more efficient than the commonly used types, makes much less noise, be more "visible" to birds and bats and occupies less space.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... LOKxSxiRsQ
http://resau.com.au/

The big questions are, how does it compare on production costs and is it scaleable to a degree sufficient for grid generation? The example shown is only 20kw.

It's less elegant perhaps, but it is interesting. We'll have to wait and see if it proves effective.

[M Paul Lloyd]

As far as I can tell it appears to be a variation on the ducted fan principle which I have to say is far more efficient than the usual three blade 'turbines' we have at the moment (actually the term 'turbine' is entirely inaccurate as far as I'm concerned but that is apparently what they will be henceforth referred to so I'll just leave it at that ) and I can see how they might prove more capable as they do not suffer from tip vortex drag for a start. However the unit cost of producing high capacity versions would be quite staggering and although they might prove advantageous on small scale installations I cannot see the design being practical on a larger scale and certainly no more efficient in the long term than the utterly pointless design currently in use.

As a bit of an aside when computer programmes began to become sufficiently powerful to simulate 'propeller' airflow a team of aerospace engineers went to a great deal of trouble to try and design the perfect non ducted propulsion system... in lay terms 'a really good propeller', and to everyone's astonishment the result resembled nothing more than the hand carved, wooden blades developed through trial and error at the very dawn of aviation during the early 20th Century.

A real life case of reinventing the wheel.