Wind turbine series

An American expert devised a way to use a series of small rotors to collect wind into electricity, with much less investment than in the traditional way.

The largest wind power plants are now about the size of small towns, made up of turbines as tall as a 30-storey building with the size of a propeller made of 747 boeing aircraft. big power, but their manufacture, transport and installation are expensive and very difficult.

The solution to this problem, according to inventor Doug Selsam, is to think of smaller things: get more energy with less material by placing 2, 10 or a day of dozens of rotors. smaller size on the same support bar, attached to a single generator.

Doug Selsam is sitting on a turbine prototype with 45 rotors, which can generate 3 kilowatts of electricity.The other end gets a high hanging balloon.

Doug Selsam's Sky Serpant system designed works as follows: Being aligned to an optimum angle, each rotor receives its wind, and increases the overall performance of tuarbine. Of course, adding more rotors also means that the physics of the system will be more complex. The key to boosting performance is to ensure that each rotor will obtain its own new wind flow, which is not wind-driven from the front, as many previous multi-rotor turbines. This requires finding the optimum tilt angle of the support against the wind direction and the ideal distance between the rotors.

The benefit of this system is to use only one tenth of the propeller material compared to the current giant wind turbines, but generate the same power.

"We tested all kinds of ideas that people thought would create a lot of wind power," said Brent Scheibel, a former turbine test specialist for the US Federal Power Agency, who currently operates. a wind test facility in California, said.

"The laws of physics make most of those ideas fail very soon. Doug's idea is one of the very, very few that I see actually having a great opportunity to go far into the market. trade school ", he said.