![]() ![]() Karustis drew several comparisons between the development of wind and solar power in the US while technological limitations prevented the former from spreading on a small scale, the fact that individual solar panels are cheap to purchase and easy to install has led to a dramatic increase in decentralised solar power. “This is the reason why we believe that micro wind, or distributed wind, has not proliferated like solar has in the last ten to 15 years.” “When you take that conventional three-bladed technology and you shrink it down to a micro scale, those blade-tip losses become much more pronounced, and so the turbine becomes much more inefficient,” said Karustis. This is air deflected by the blades outside the rotor sweep area and not converted into electricity while this is less of an issue in utility-scale turbines due to the larger quantities of power produced, if a distributed turbine has a maximum production of just 6KW, as does Halo’s turbine, these losses can be significant. The static shrouds also help to overcome a key limitation of smaller-scale turbines, that of blade-tip losses. The result is a turbine that can produce twice the power of non-shrouded turbines of the same size, and is roughly half the size of conventional turbines of the same power capacity. “If the turbine is seeing a five metre per second (m/s) ambient wind, what’s really happening is that the blades are seeing a wind speed of around 10-12m/s.” “Jets of air that go through the rotor sweep area and between and around the two static shrouds come together downwind of the turbine, creating a lower pressure, which allows more air to rush in through the rotor sweep area from upwind of the turbine,” said Halo head of business development Charlie Karustis. Halo’s turbine maximises its efficiency despite its limited size because of the static shrouds built around the three rotating blades, which create a fixed perimeter around the edge of the rotor sweep area, the space where the blades turn, effectively increasing the wind speed of air pulled through the blades. It measures just 12 feet in diameter, and could help address the wind sector’s imbalance between utility-scale and distributed operations. One of the leading proponents of the ideas is US-based HALO Energy, which has developed a 6KW shrouded turbine. Defined as a wind turbine producing less than 100KW, these smaller turbines can be deployed in a greater range of locations, and can involve individual people directly in the production of clean energy. ![]() Distributed wind has emerged as a solution to this issue. ![]()
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