The Windbelt – a Cheap Wind-Power Generator 75
dominique_cimafranca writes "Shawn Frayne, a 28-year old inventor, has developed a small wind-powered generator that can be used to power small appliances in developing countries. Unlike the typical propeller design one expects of wind generators, the windbelt uses the oscillation of a membrane that follows the vibration of bridge. The oscillation drives small magnets which generate the electricity. From the article: 'Frayne's device, which he calls a Windbelt, is a taut membrane fitted with a pair of magnets that oscillate between metal coils. Prototypes have generated 40 milliwatts in 10-mph slivers of wind, making his device 10 to 30 times as efficient as the best microturbines. Frayne envisions the Windbelt costing a few dollars and replacing kerosene lamps in Haitian homes.'"
The simple things in life. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's simple - cheap to manufacture and I bet it's as reliable as hell.
This guy is genius.
Re:The simple things in life. (Score:4, Insightful)
Hrm, please provide references for your "Saving the Third World requires gigawatts" estimate.
One of the primary goals of most people who look to develop tech for improving quality of life in the third world is to find ways to increase efficiency so that the "gigawatts" you reference aren't needed. The first world has been spoiled by it's wealth and access to cheap energy (both mostly due to work done in the last few centuries to subjugate the rest of the world, thus creating the third world). People who don't have access to something at all are much more willing to put up with, what people in the first world would consider, inconveniences in order to get it. The idea is that a family in Haiti would be willing to put up with the inconvenience of only having a single, bare, LED bulb for their shack as opposed to the risk of burning to death using an oil lamp, candle, or open fire for light.
I realize that for most people in the first world its hard to imaging having to make that trade-off. For me, it would be unthinkable that I'd have to use anything less than a raft of high lumen light fixtures with diffusers/shades to completely light my living space. I'll gladly replace my incandescent with high efficiency compact fluorescents, but I would never think of downgrading the brightness. Likewise, I would consider it barbaric to have to install oil lamps/torches in my home for light. Of course, I'm not the target market for this product.
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These things seem pretty well scalable for only the cost of the parts. The little desktop one he's got generates milliwatts, imagine what several of these, lined up on a roof would do. Put in just as many at 90 degrees to those just above them, and you're covered for winds from four directions. Work out a weather vane system that keeps the fabric edge-on into the wind all the time, and it can use any light breeze from any direction. I'd probably put up with those to light my house just to lower my power
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One of these windbelt machines will light up only two 20 milliamp LEDs
That's only in the current configuration he's using.....
What happens if:
1) you put magnets at both ends, does it double the output?
2) you make coils "all along" the belt? Does that drastically increase output?
3) you lengthen or shorten the belt? It changes the harmonics, but how does it affect the output?
Other questions:
He's using a desk fan *ON HIGH*. What are the wind requirements needed to generate what level of output? What is the minimum wind speed to initiate the harmonics (watching the video, you
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Hrm, please provide references for your "Saving the Third World requires gigawatts" estimate.
Suppose just one watt of electricity per person is all you need to make a huge difference to peoples' lives. One watt per person times 3 gigapeople in poverty = 3 gigawatts.
Your LED light bulb, by the way, is going to draw around a watt. A compact fluorescent, ten times that.
But tell us about your prototype power generator for the 3rd world. If you don't have one,
I don't have one, but I'm not the one getting head
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Unless these impoverished people are living someplace with a lot of wind, to get any decent light, they'd be better off with a stationary bicycle powering a generator, which charges a car battery (or better yet, a Li-ion battery). A human pedaling a bicycle can generate many watt-hours of electricity pretty quickly. A few minutes of pedaling would probably yield hours of power for a small LED lamp.
I just got a wind-up LED flashlight/radio from Walgreens last week for $3 in the closeout bin. Just a little
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The idea is to power simple devices like radios for public health and education and replace kerosene lamps with milliwatt LED's, not to power an entire household with PS3's, plasma displays and game rigs.
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To think that you'd only need 35,000 of these (before losses) to run your average hair dryer.
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Yeah, that used to be the big stumbling block for all those micro-generator ideas, right up until genetically enhanced rocket scientists with brains the size of your house figured out that hair dryers are really energy intensive, and not really all that important.
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FYI, a hair dryer runs on a normal 120V/15A wall socket. That's *nothing* compared to the power delivered to your AC. Heck, even washer/dryer outlets are 240V/30A, and a range outlet is 240V/50A.
This is way, way, way too little power to do anything toward the electrification of the third world. You could turn a hand crank generator for one minute and produce more power as one of these things would produce in an entire windy day. 40 milliwats is comparable to the amount of power you can get from a hamste
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If your prototype makes milliwatts and Saving the Third World requires gigawatts, that makes you 10^(-12) of a genius.
No. If your inexpensive prototype makes milliwatts, and there are real world applications that require cheap milliwatts, that makes you a genius.
But tell us about your prototype power generator for the 3rd world. If you don't have one, then by your own "math", you're a complete idiot.
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Nobody apart from you said anything about saving the third world. Whether he can do that or not has nothing to do with this being a pretty good idea. He does sound like he has plans for scaling it up as well, though he has a pretty good niche market to start on with the efficient micropower thing.
You can ignore this if you want, but I expect all those into engineering and technology are a bit more impressed, and imagining what could be done with larger scale systems. Our company is in the process of manufac
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The big "gotcha" is the 10mph wind.
Go pull up your local weather station on the Weather Underground [wunderground.com], and take a look at what percentage of the time the wind was blowing at above 10mph.
It's not terribly *rare*, but also not terribly *common*. The reason why wind turbines and sailboats both tend to be extremely tall is that the winds become both stronger and more reliable at higher altitudes.
Think about it: Air currents are going to be substantially lower at low altitudes, especially when surrounded by hous
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On the other hand, if we can make wind power cheap (cheap turbines, which might not be quite as efficient, but still work, and towers constructed out of locally-available materials), a huge impact will be made.
You could simply put several of these mechanisms on a pole? It's not that hard to figure out :p Efficient storage is really the 'killer app' because then you don't need the wind to be blowing every time you want to switch on the lights. We have plenty of tech for collecting energy these days, it's the storage that is now the main issue. With decent batteries/supercaps you could be collecting energy all day with these babies and you'd only need to be drawing power for a few hours in the evening.
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With decent batteries/supercaps
People need to stop using this phrase until either one of those two things actually exist, and are remotely affordable.
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That's why I said "it's the storage that is now the main issue", meaning that we already have plenty of ways to collect energy. This invention is still cool, but any invention for harvesting energy is limited in its usefulness if you have to use all the energy immediately.
Now we need to concentrate more on efficient ways of actually storing it - especially if it's going to be collected in such tiny amounts like this device does.
I don't think this is new (Score:1)
I seem to remember hearing about this a couple years ago...
Re:I don't think this is new (Score:5, Informative)
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So basically this is a large scale version of a ribbon microphone? Except backwards? Wouldn't it work much better if it actually worked exactly like a ribbon magnet, i.e. fixed magnetic bars on either side of a conductive ribbon? You'd certainly get less drag on the ribbon if it isn't trying to move heavy magnets around. Who wants to build one and find out? :-D
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Worst thing is that if you RTFA you see that it was from last year. How come the editors could not even see that ?
flashback to last year (Score:5, Informative)
dupe: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/14/1240206 [slashdot.org]
Re:flashback to last year (Score:5, Informative)
Heh, not only is it a dupe, it's a dupe to the exact same article!
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That was meant to be funny, but I guess karma whore works too...
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Question. (Score:3, Interesting)
Math for scaleup... (Score:5, Informative)
40mW in 10 MPH wind for $5: Scale to 1W would take an array of 25 at a cost of $125.
This would be, looking at his prototype, about 50cm x 100cm...
The cost/watt however, is just astronomically bad. A 1 kW wind turbine is $3000 (which would produce ~400W at that windspeed)...
Its really a clever idea, but just not efficient enough to be economical, even to just glow an LED lamp.
Re:Math for scaleup... (Score:5, Informative)
It would appear that the design goal is to scale down, not to scale up.
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http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2008/6/7/72645/40738 [fieldlines.com]
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Forty milliwatts for $5 is outrageously expensive. For $5 they could get one of those torches with the built-in generator and hand crank. They could crank it for 1 minute, then get 1 hour of light (if you believe the packaging). So assuming the torch has a 1 watt LED, the human needs to put in about 70 watts for 1 minute. To run a 1 watt LED off 40 mW generators, you need 25 generators, at a cost of $125. Better to go with the torch.
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Except after the initial outlay for the winbelt, you never need to crank again. Any man would pay $125 for indefinite free cranking.
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Let me put it another way. For $109 [energymatters.com.au] you can buy a 5 watt solar panel. Now do you really want to pay $125 to get 1 watt from a winbelt, when you could pay less and get 5 watts from a solar panel? Winbelts are too expensive, they cost 5 times as much as a solar panel.
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I was mostly just wanting to make a joke about cranking :p but put it another way, solar panels only work during the day, and they're wanting power at night! A battery solves that problem, but car batteries aren't that cheap either.. (unless you get one cheap in a junkyard or a wreck by the side of the road, of course).
Re:Math for scaleup... (Score:5, Interesting)
Ah, yes. But if you were actually a member of his target audience (dirt poor people in countries like Haiti making $2-$4 per day) then you couldn't afford that fancy $3000 turbine in your wildest dreams. Smaller, more affordable turbines grow dramatically less efficient due to friction forces at small sizes. In order to actually make your point valid, you'd have to find a wind turbine of the same wattage range that is cheaper.
The whole point here is very specific. Poor people, like the ones in Haiti don't have many things that need electricity. The problem is, the only source of light they have is fire based causing an increases risk of burning to death in a hovel fire. The problem is compounded by the fact that third world shanty towns usually don't have much in the way of municipal fire codes. Assuming LED bulbs come down in price far enough (which the look to do eventually) they have the energy efficiency needed to run off this thing, the ruggedness to last in that kind of environment, and the long life to make themselves truly economical. They could, completely, replace oil lamps, candles, and other fire based light sources. It has the added bonus of eliminating one of the motivating factors in the deforestation of Haiti, which, in turn, is one of the reasons they've had such horrible flooding in this last hurricane.
This thing still has a lot of things to prove before it can be said to be useful (durability is one of them) but cost/watt isn't an issue for the application being envisioned. As for first-world applications he can use to fund his third-world goal, he just has to look long enough for similar places where a microturbine might have, otherwise, been the only option.
Re:Math for scaleup... (Score:4, Insightful)
I remember reading about this last year; it's very, very neat. Not only is there a very low up-front cost to get started with a single unit, but they also have low maintenance costs.
A wind turbine, even a small cheap one, is a fearsomely complicated device that requires all sort of exotic tooling to build and maintain. Think of all those bearings, the gearbox, the generator coils, etc. The windbelt is an inert frame containing an inert ribbon, a couple of magnets, and a voice coil. The only bit of that you can't build by hand, using low technology, are the magnets, and they don't wear out. Possibly you might have trouble finding the right wire for the voice coil; but rewinding the failed one is a tricky but perfectly manageable job to do by hand.
So what these will do is not just provide accessible power, but rapidly bootstrap a complete power economy based around the technology. Which is the point...
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http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_wind.html [otherpower.com]
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Been to silk route in China many years ago. On one of the 2000 meter+ mountain, found some nomads who herd goats for a living and sleep in tents at night. While watching the grass grow was their daily entertainment, they found out bringing a TV there was feasible.
These people put up a 5' diameter fan shape blade to drive a dynamo, which was taken from used car. The output was connected to lead acid battery. The generator will run full day, and after sunset, the lead acid battery was connected to an inver
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THen you use a mechanical generator, as it is probably cheaper to get 1W out of a OLPC-spool generator or the like.
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I'm sure that the plant that powers my home cost millions of dollars to build; I could never afford that either. Thankfully, I share that cost with thousands of other people.
Don't get me wrong -- I wouldn't for a moment suggest that providing electricity to a small Haitian village is as simple as dropping a
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Good luck setting up some kind of infrastructure in a shanty town! I've not seen any in real life, but the pictures/movies (think the start of Incredible Hulk) I've seen show that they are crazy and totally unstructured!
Besides that, you have already pointed out plenty of problems that would arise even if it were architecturally possible to create a power grid in a shanty town. A large wind turbine would be expensive to maintain, not to mention who is actually responsible for the maintenance.
People are thin
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I don't think his point was simply that the cost per watt was bad, I think it was also that the power output of 1 or 10 of them isn't really worth much.
Focus on the developing world uses. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, sure, he's using optimized materials. But anything thin and flexible could be tested, have its optimal shape for flutter in a given environment determined, and used to make these. I knew some guys who did the sensors for their thesis using strips of mylar from potato chip bags.
Magnets are the one hard part and even those can be pulled from dead speakers or whatever.
Wound wire? We've all built our own generators as kids, yes? Winding enough for an electromagnet like that is no big deal. And wire turns up in waste streams all over the place. That's why so many baskets and such from rural craftspeople are made of it.
Rigid frame? Whatever's around. I'm not entirely sure just how rigid that frame needs to be but worst case scenario we're talking about a chunk of iron cut out of a dead car.
And so on.
What this does is enable illiterate people with a few hours of training to make a device from things they don't have to pay for that can power basic things like lights. And from what I'm seeing, it's the kind of thing that will propagate. UNESCO staffer teaches Jose. Jose's brother comes by and asks about it; Jose teaches his brother. Brother's wife wants one to sew better; she makes one for herself. The wife's friends drop by . .
Excellent. All we need to do is provide superbright LEDs and whatever parts turn out to most be in demand and soon, count on it, there will be innovations by the dozens turning up that the inventors and NGO folks never even knew about.
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I don't know how usefull this thing is to Jose-sixpack but he should certainly be given the opportunity to judge that for himself.
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Last time I checked, the micro-loan organizations did not include 'pay you back' as a feature (they use the returned capital to fund more loans, which is great, but there really isn't a good reason to obfuscate this).
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I believe Kiva, at least, does allow you to get your money back once the loan is repaid:
4) When lenders get their money back, they can re-lend to someone else in need, donate their funds to Kiva (to cover operational expenses), or withdraw their funds. --How Kiva Works [kiva.org]
The lender doesn't get any of the interest from the loan, just the original principle. Other micro-loan organizations may work differently, of course.
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The important number there is the "$5". For the target market of these devices, that five bucks may be more than a day's pay. Sure a village could all save up together and buy a more efficient wind turbine but third world countries aren't known for being particularly stable or safe, a $3000 turbine is likely going to be a target for theft by the local militants, provided it isn't confiscated by corrupt local officials first. Small cheap and portable are greater assets in this si
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40 mW * 20 hours = 800 mW hours. So in an area with reliable wind, $5 yields you about 1 watt-hour a day (or some multiple, but even 5 watt-hours isn't particularly useful). I really can't think of any practical use for 1 watt-hour per day (This amount of energy is roughly equivalent to 250 milligrams of sugar, which is quite a lot less than a single sugar cube).
So it is small and portable, which are nice, but it is also nearly useless, which isn't so nice.
(In the U.S., 1 watt-hour per day costs somewhere w
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That's because you are thinking like a first worlder, not a third worlder. 40 mW is just right to run a single LED light, which is much safer and more reliable than an oil lamp or candles. Sure that might not seem like a lot to you, but try going camping without a light source and you will quickly see the value of a simple light. Yes, 1-watt per day is cheap, but only once you have the service (read: infrastructure) I pay about $0.50 a day j
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Of course, some people might think it is condescending to insist that $0.25 (annually!) of electricity will be transformative (and that price even includes a healthy premium over the actual KW-hour charge).
Another issue is that the competition is a lot cheaper:
http://store.altenergystore.com/Solar-Panels/1-to-50-Watt-Solar-Panels/c675/ [altenergystore.com]
A village spending $100 (or otherwise obtaining/being provided) for 5 or 10 watts of solar makes a hell of a lot more sense than spending $125 or $250 for the same thing.
It is
You've got that wrong! (Score:3, Insightful)
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You sir are a moron.
Cool. (Score:2)
Hooray for the Bernoulli effect!
Can this scale up? (Score:3, Interesting)
Some things can scale, but there are other things that really can't be enlarged. For example, ionizing air currents. Yes, it works on a small scale to move air through a Sharper Image filter, but you couldn't effectively push the air through a house's HVAC system with just thin wires and a high potential difference.
If this belt technology can be scaled up to generate kilowatts as opposed to milliwatts, it would have a real use. Otherwise, its similar to small solar panel technology in the 1980s -- will power a small motor or a clock, but that's basically it. It may at best end up a niche product as something to power remotely located low-wattage computers, such as weather stations in heavy forest.
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Speaking of those solar panels, where the hell are they now? I'd spend a _lot_ of money for a laptop that doesn't need AC power.
Is this a dup? (Score:2)
This article is from 2007. Didn't we cover this once before?
If you want a really cheap wind turbine, the usual answer is to chop an old oil drum in half and mount the halves on the end of an old auto alternator. [youtube.com] Then you can charge a car battery.
What's in a name? (Score:1)
Have you look at the comments? (Score:1)
Have you looked at the comments to the popular mechanics article? It's really not meant to be a flame, but most of them look like they're from 12 yr. old kids! Between one who think the only thing you can make out of it is a flashlight, to one who want to put an end to the U.S. energy crisis using that... So far every single comment I read ranged from being pointless to totally stupid... wow!
Website (Score:4, Informative)
Sound? (Score:2)
Its not wind-powered (Score:2)
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I think you're a bit confused. This is not a 'free energy' scam, the power is coming from the wind. Movement in a magnetic field generates power. This is how a lot of electrical generators work [wikipedia.org]. Some apparently work without magnets, I'm not an engineer so I've not studied this stuff in depth. I don't know if this system gradually makes the magnet lose its magnetism, but somebody above said the magnets wouldn't run out, and he probably knows what he's talking about (not definite but I'm sure someone will chi
I dont get it.... (Score:1)
>making his device 10 to 30 times as efficient as the best microturbines
How do you say the following and still sound smart?
> My idea is 40% as efficient as yours???
wind powered birth control (Score:1, Troll)
What the poor countries really need is less population. The least painful way to do this is birth control. Or, the rich countries of the world could just stay out of the way and let nature regulate the population by the means of starvation, disease, and warfare.
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Wow...I got modded 'troll'. I guess it's not politically correct. Ha ha ha.