The Birmingham Blade: geographically tailored urban wind turbine designed by AI
birmingham.ac.uk
birmingham.ac.uk
Wrong problem, unless you're in an isolated area. There are already good wind turbines for isolated plants. That's more a ruggedness problem than an efficiency problem.
There are good reasons wind turbines have become huge. The big ones are far more cost-effective, partly because wind speeds are higher around 100-200m from the ground. 1970s wind turbines were in the 10KW-20KW range. Pacheco Pass in California had row after row of them. Now, 1MW is small, and the little ones have been removed.
Here's a video of the thing.[1] No info about how much power they get out, but it's probably under a kilowatt. Three standard solar planels will produce more than that, and would fit in about the same ground space.
This is a decorative object, not a power source. It's in the same category as energy-generating sidewalks.[2] These are Rule of Cool devices, not useful energy sources.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StLyTZazgVE
[2] https://www.archdaily.com/911965/sidewalks-that-generate-ene...
A feasible home wind turbine would be a good addition in winter.
Or buying a share of a massive wind turbine, but the maths of Ripple Energy have never stacked up when I've looked at it.
At varying speeds.
I'd imagine things with moving parts need alot of maintenance too.
Their solar offer seemingly made even less financial sense, due to the very high cost of paying for your slice of the huge costs of running the national grid. The only reason for going with it would be environmental (effectively subsidising sustainable energy on the grid to displace other sources)
I'm most sceptical of the storm rating of this rig. Putting large rotating sheets on city roofs seems like a hazard nobody would want to take up for a few watts.
It's conventional. There are lots of "how I built a small vertical wind turbine from scrap parts" articles and videos.[1][2] This is easy to do and worth it for off-grid locations. Most people just cut blades out of some cylinder such as a metal or plastic barrel. The Birmingham people just optimized the blades a bit.
Note the lack of a direct comparison with a simple blade form vertical wind turbine.
Nothing wrong with doing this, but the hype is excessive.
I met a guy who did one of those. Huge scam artist vibes, but people absolutely threw greenwashing money at him and could not stop writing articles.
Obviously no concrete numbers in his flashy "decks" because they were all completely terrible and made no practical sense if you actually did the numbers (watt-minutes per day if I recall).
I have no way of judging how valuable it is, but achieveng 7x improvement in efficiency of this wind turbine, and the team this company has[1] may hint their process could be quite valuable.
Also the AI angle is pretty silly hype because multidimensional optimisation techniques have been part of the industrial design toolbox for decades. Wind turbine companies are very keenly aware of optimisation algorithms for squeezing everything out of a blade geometry. CFD is an entire field for a reason.
Random 2006 article in numerical optimisation of vertical wind turbines from a careless search: https://iawe.org/Proceedings/CWE2006/MC3-01.pdf
Not in Birmingham though…
You even didn't notice it. Job well done!
Pros: Less need for moving power a long way. (This is a lie because you can't generate enough power in the urban environment anyway.)
Cons: Maintenance is much more expensive. Less wind. More turbulence.
I wonder what definition of AI they are using. It seems anything that uses mathematics is now AI.
> Our evolutionary simulations have confirmed the Birmingham Blade is up to seven times more efficient than existing designs in Birmingham’s wind speeds and urban environment.
Pretty good idea.
From what I've read, they iterated through 2000 simulations over the course of a few weeks.
It that being called "AI" just now, or has it been called "AI" since the beginning? A lot of the optimization algorithms we take for granted nowadays originated from AI research.
> import scipy.optimize
Look ma! I made an AI!
Is there a clue in there somewhere?
IMHO we should carefully pick our climate/energy fights, and install whatever tech is most appropriate, even if that's 'nothing, here, build a transmission line to the irish sea offshore wind farms instead'.
I do like the cleverness of custom parametric solutions, but also hate them for their specific, non-reusable, design-overhead aspects. Just deploy a few more cheap, modular, repairable, replaceable, generic units, instead of the costly custom designs.