Today more than ever, environmental concerns have taken a prominent seat in the forefront of people’s minds. The coupling of this with rapid advancements in the field of wind turbine generation has made this mode of electricity production a realistic option on the commercial scale. It has become more and more possible to produce ‘green’ electricity at reasonable rates, which translates into profit that may become more significant with the impending deregulation of the energy market. Apart from implementing on-shoe and offshore wind farms, electric companies can also use the (wasted) wind energy generated from high speed moving cars along the highways to produce electricity
The development and exploitation of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) which substitute the conventional energy resources, many of which are very quickly being exhausted, is a basic feature of the energy policy of technologically developed countries.
Modern wind turbines fall into two basic groups: the horizontal axis (hawt) variety and the vertical axis (vawt) design, like the eggbeater-style Darrieus model, named after its French inventor.

wind turbine configurations

Horizontal axis and Vertical axis wind turbines

The VAWT may be chosen because of:

Are more stable in turbulent conditions (e.g. wind generated from passingvehicles)
• Can capture wind from all directions
• Are typically easier to build than the more traditional horizontal axis wind turbines
• Have the generator and the gearbox on the ground which simplifies maintenance process and also reduce cost as no lowering is required.
• The one rotation axis in practice reduces vibration and stress to their nominal levels.
• There is virtually no cut-out speed which means that the turbine can generate electricity in all conditions.
• They are rather silent because the blades do not create the whooshing noise that occurs with HAWTs when blades pass close to the mast at each revolution.

The electricity generated by spinning these turbines could be fed back into the grid. The wind turbines in the proposal should be of a quiet running type due to urban territory close. Certainly in many built up areas there is enough constant traffic volume to maintain a steady airflow through much of the day. The big question that needs to be answered is whether the nature of the turbulent airflow could keep the turbines turning. If a VAWT turbine could be optimized to work in that environment it seems like it might be a very worthwhile investment.

 

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This entry was posted on Δευτέρα, Μαρτίου 23rd, 2009 at 1:27 μμ and is filed under Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWT). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.