Wick-Wind-Turbine

An experimental wind turbine with multi blades in Venturi airflow, aiming to achieve higher wind to electricpower conversion.

Introduction

The technical development of electric energy generating wind turbines seems to have reached the last development stage with the design off the three blade horizontal rotor turbines. Scale up of these turbines is limited to larger blade diameter in order to harvest a greater airflow area and higher hub point to reach into faster and less disturbed wind flow. Marginal improvement is achieved on blade and generator design.

There have been some attempts to improve airflow out of the wind turbine but very few attempts to accelerate the wind in front of the turbine using nozzles.
Facilitating Venturi’s effect and Bernoulli’s principle, where a change in flow area changes the air flow speed, the turbine design introduced here enhances the energy output due to accelerating the mass air flow, (see theoretical basics here, Theorie section).

The nozzle-diffuser combination presented here will improve the effect of the turbine and the use of the energy received in the wind many times over. For experimental and proof of concept a test turbine much similar to the animation below has been designed and built.
But for commercial purpose a pitch controled multi blade turbine is much to expensive and complicated to build, maintain and to operate. Wind-, and structual loads require a modified enhanced version which also reduces the financial expenditure. The fixed pitch blade turbine (as seen in the second clip) will be the preferd commercial version.




Hint: Keep mouse over clip to run. Move mouse outside to pause. Expand video to get readable text.