Aeroturbines Wind Turbines for the Urban Environment
Aeroturbines Wind Turbines for the Urban Environment
The Aeroturbine is a wind turbine designed to work in an urban environment. It was invented by University of Illinois at Chicago Professor Bill Becker. Like many others before him, Professor Becker tried to use standard wind turbine designs in the urban environment of Chicago and found he got less than satisfactory results. He realized that was due to the difference between wind in the big city and wind in the corridors that work well for large scale traditional wind turbine designs.
Unlike wind corridors like the rural midwest where T. Boone Pickens and others are building large scale wind turbines, the wind blows in wild, turbulent ways within the wind canyons in a big city. It whips around, up and down buildings. He found that you can’t just stick a regular wind turbine design on top of a building in a big city and get the power output you are looking for. Even worse, there is sometimes a danger of a powerful gust tearing a blade off of the turbine and endangering one or more of your neighbors!
Professor Becker eventually came up with a design to handle wind hitting the turbine from any direction. It is an elegant design that looks somewhat like the double helix of DNA. The simple, elegant yet highly effective design is reminissent of those from one of the visionaries he(and I) admires most, R. Buckminster Fuller.
His blade design of caged rotors result in quiet, low vibration operation. They can be mounted vertically or horizontally and are stackable. Professor Becker expects the cost of his new turbines to decrease considerably once he has begun mass production of his designs.
People like Professor Becker will help America reduce it’s dependence on energy from foreign sources and keep more of our hard earned money right here at home. We will be following his progress and advise our readers when his turbines will become widely available to the public.
