EWICON: wind turbine without blades

A few days ago on Habré there was a news that the energy of Denmark is 25% now dependent on wind turbines . It is clear that wind turbines are not a panacea, and these mechanisms have some drawbacks, including a large number of moving parts, blade wear, noise, and so on. Recently, the Dutch company Mecanoo presented a trial model of an electrostatic wind generator, which has no blades or moving parts at all.

In this device, water droplets emerging from horizontally placed nozzles are used as the source and energy storage device. Drops of water have a positive charge, and in the usual case, these drops are attracted to negatively charged elecrodes / surfaces. But the system uses the wind, which relates drops in the opposite direction, to positively charged electrodes. All this leads to an increase in the potential energy of a positively charged drop, and this energy is obtained when the drop falls on a positively charged electrode.
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As you can see in the photo, the generator consists of a metal frame, inside which insulated tubes are placed in a horizontal position. Each tube contains nozzles and several electrodes. The video below shows how the system works well. Unfortunately, the exact performance of such a "windmill" is not specified, it only says that the amount of generated energy depends on the number of water droplets, on the charge of droplets, on the wind speed and on the strength of the electric field.

In general, the idea is interesting, but it’s still far from practical realization, which brings energy in significant quantities. Now the prototype system is located next to the Delft University of Technology.



Via dvice