I saw this on the front a VW Van on the side of Highway 18 today. I thought Art for the front lawn? A sail for an electric VW Van, I don't know. So I pulled over to ask. It turns out this is just about the first time this new form of vertical wind turbine has seen the light of day. Until now this has been a "Black Project" worked on in secret for months. The two men, Drew Rokeby Thomas and his friend John (didn't get the last name) have a company called ART TURBINE Inc. on Saltspring Island. This new design of turbine could be used in the wind or water to produce enough electricity to power a small house (or use two, they are small). Today they are in the process of testing the output of the turbine at different wind speeds, or highway wind speeds to be more correct. With the "art form" turbine attached to the top of the van they are using the long straight sections of highway 18 to test it's output and rotation. Judging by the number of people that pulled over to ask about the object on the van they have a lot of interest in their turbine. Now don't quote me on any of the details, for more information on this turbine check their website.
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2/3/2012 11:01:58 pm
Nice to meet you Malcom, thanks for the photo's and blogsphere entry. It's nice to be bringing our project out of the dark, I've been working on it for over 4 years, and only since last summer has it been out of the dark (no publicity). My Co-worker here is Jon Scott, he is an engineer helping to optimize the system and make sure that our data collection is working the way it should. We test this way because wind tunnels have sometimes produced results that aren't reflected in the real world, so instead of blowing air over the turbine, we move the turbine through the air. It's often called moving platform testing, and Burt Rutan (designer of Space Ship 1 uses it sometimes too). It's not as convenient, because we have to wait for good weather, but it's more effective and inexpensive (a wind tunnel for this size turbine would have to be at least 20 ft wide and 20ft high, there's only one in Canada (Ottawa) and it's more than a few thousand dollars per day. I know you'd think hot air would be cheap and plentiful in Ottawa, but those feds know how to bill! The van is actually a Toyota, it's one of the used imports from Japan. When we are testing, the fin out front of the van has a wind speed instrument on it, to measure how fast we are moving through the air, and to account for gusts from other vehicles and any background wind, We use a position sensor on the base of the turbine shaft to measure turbine rotation speed, and a band brake and load arm with a load cell. All these instruments measurements are recorded 20 times a second to our laptop, and with them we can see how much energy the turbine is producing, and how much potential energy was in the wind through the turbine. We use a micro electric motor to adjust the band break as we drive so we can find the maximum energy produced at any given wind speed. In some of our higher speed tests yesterday we were producing more than 2000W! The turbine is patent pending, and we hope to be building some production versions this year, which would be about 2 times as large as this one. Our testing went very well, and we thank the patience of drivers who had to put up with our odd looking slow moving vehicle. Best Wishes
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