Skip to main content

These typhoon-powered wind turbines could power Japan for 50 years straight

From a single storm.
A Japanese engineer has invented the world's first typhoon-powered wind turbine - an electricity generator designed to harness the energy packed inside tropical cyclones.
Engineer Atsushi Shimizu says an array of his generators could power Japan for up to 50 years from a single typhoon - and considering six such storms have hit the country this year, we're talking about a lot of potential energy.
"Japan actually has a lot more wind power than it does solar power - it's just not utilised," Shimizu told Junko Ogura and Jenni Marsh at CNN. "Japan has the potential to be a superpower of wind."
According to Shimizu, who founded green energy company Challenergy in 2013, the wind turbines Japan imports from Europe are not suitable for the country's specific climate. In particular, they have an unfortunate tendency to get damaged by typhoons.
That's where these custom-made turbines come in. While the technology has yet to face an actual typhoon, it's designed to cope with unpredictable and violent wind patterns, thanks to its omnidirectional axis, and its adjustable blade speeds ensure that it don't spin out of control.
Key to the invention is the principle of the Magnus effect - the way air curves around anything that rotates (like a basketball), and applies pressure on it at the same time.
In this case, it allows the blades around the turbine to generate movement - which you can see the video below. At the same time, the central rod can be tightened to slow down or stop the blades, regardless of the external forces generated by the typhoon.


In the company's simulated tests, the turbine achieved a 30 percent efficiency level. That's lower than the normal 40 percent, but then again, normal turbines can't operate in typhoons.
And the reduced power efficiency might not be such a big deal, anyway, given the massive amount of energy we're talking about here. In one go, typhoons can produce a level of kinetic energy that's half the entire electrical generating capacity of our planet. The only issue is being able to physically trap it. 
But there are certainly challenges ahead. Even if Shimizu and his team figure out how to catch all the energy from a typhoon, current battery technology might not even be capable of storing it.
Still, let's take this one step at a time. The researchers installed their first prototype in Okinawa in July, and are now waiting for a chance to test it with a real typhoon. 
Japanese authorities are particularly keen to find new energy sources right now, after the disaster at Fukushima derailed its nuclear energy program. Roughly 84 percent of the country's energy is currently imported.
But if Shimizu's turbine can prove that it can take on - and harness - the energy of an actual typhoon, it could be the answer to making Japan more self-reliant in the future.
"We know our chances are slim," Shimizu acknowledged to Peter Rothenberg at Tech In Asia. "But there is a chance and this is a technology that we need. I feel like Don Quixote taking on the windmills. He lost, but we are going to win."




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This strange mineral grows on dead bodies and turns them blue

If you were to get up close and personal with Ötzi the Iceman – the 5,000-year-old mummy of a  tattooed ,  deep-voiced  man who died and was frozen in the Alps – you’d notice that his skin is flecked with tiny bits of blue. At first, it would appear that these oddly bluish crystal formations embedded in his skin are from freezing to death or some other sort of trauma, but it’s actually a mineral called  vivianite  (or blue ironstone) and it happens to form quite often on corpses left in iron-rich environments. For Ötzi, the patches of vivianite are  from him resting  near rocks with flecks of iron in them, but other cases are way more severe. According to Chris Drudge at Atlas Obscura , a man named John White was buried in a cast iron coffin back in 1861. During those days, coffins often had a window for grieving family members to peer inside even if the lid was closed during the funeral. Sometime after he was buried, that window broke, allow...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's Official: Time Crystals Are a New State of Matter, and Now We Can Create Them

Peer-review has spoken. Earlier this year , physicists had put together a blueprint for how to make and measure time crystals - a bizarre state of matter with an atomic structure that repeats not just in space, but in time, allowing them to maintain constant oscillation without energy. Two separate research teams managed to create what looked an awful lot like time crystals  back in January,  and now both experiments have successfully passed peer-review for the first time, putting the 'impossible' phenomenon squarely in the realm of reality. "We've taken these theoretical ideas that we've been poking around for the last couple of years and actually built it in the laboratory,"  says one of the researchers , Andrew Potter from Texas University at Austin. "Hopefully, this is just the first example of these, with many more to come." Time crystals  are one of the coolest things physics has dished up in recent months, because they point to a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Dark Side Of The Love Hormone Oxytocin

New research shows oxytocin isn't the anti-anxiety drug we thought it was. Oxytocin, the feel-good bonding hormone released by physical contact with another person, orgasm and childbirth (potentially encouraging  monogamy ), might have a darker side. The  love drug  also plays an important role in intensifying  negative emotional memories  and increasing feelings of fear in future stressful situations, according to a new study. Two experiments performed with mice found that the hormone activates a signaling molecule called extracellular-signal-related kinases (ERK), which has been associated with the way the brain  forms memories   of fear . According to Jelena Radulovic, senior author on the study and a professor at Northwestern University's medical school, ERK stimulates fear pathways in the brain's lateral septum, the region with the highest levels of oxytocin. Mice without oxytocin receptors and mice with even more oxytocin receptors tha...
Post a Comment
Read more