A Spanish company, Vortex Bladeless, has developed an electric wind generator characterized by its lack of blades. The system, also known as Vortex Bladeless, leverages aerodynamic instabilities to capture en-ergy. Vortex engineers created prototypes of this innovative wind turbine a couple of years ago. To reduce development time and cost, they turned to finite-elementanalysis (FEA) and computational fluiddynamics (CFD) solutions to hone their designs and product development process.
The wind generator has a cylindrical shape that oscillates in the wind, and electricity is generated through a lineal alternator system. The device is configured with a fixed mast, a power generator and a hollow, lightweight and semi-rigid fiberglass cylinder on top.
The outer conical cylinder is designed to be substantially rigid and has the ability to vibrate, remaining an-chored to the bottom rod. The top of the cylinder is unconstrained and oscillates in the wind. An inner cylin-drical rod, which may penetrate into themast for up to 20% of its length, is anchored to it at its top and secured to the ground atits bottom part.
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Bladeless wind turbines
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