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Old Posted Oct 24, 2011, 4:32 AM
amor de cosmos amor de cosmos is offline
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wind turbines on top of buildings

Seems that the roof of a building would be a good place to put a wind turbine, since it's an exposed location & it could power the building. With a vertical-axis turbine, the gearbox & generator can be put on lower floors for accessibility & the wind can even be directed over the top of the building to turn the rotor. Wiki says the downsides are
Quote:
The key disadvantages include the low rotational speed with the consequential higher torque and hence higher cost of the drive train, the inherently lower power coefficient, the 360 degree rotation of the aerofoil within the wind flow during each cycle and hence the highly dynamic loading on the blade, the pulsating torque generated by some rotor designs on the drive train, and the difficulty of modelling the wind flow accurately and hence the challenges of analysing and designing the rotor prior to fabricating a prototype.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_tu...al_axis_design

I wonder what can be done to minimize these downsides? I don't know much about this stuff.

Last edited by amor de cosmos; Oct 24, 2011 at 4:42 AM.
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Old Posted Oct 24, 2011, 7:16 PM
mhays mhays is offline
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Just a guess, but I doubt that the energy generation is more than a token amount, particularly when stacked against what it takes to build the wind turbine system and the additional structure and space it would require.
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Old Posted Oct 24, 2011, 9:27 PM
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cityscapes cityscapes is offline
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This building in downtown Portland has wind turbines on it's roof but they only generate a negligible amount of electricity.
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Old Posted Oct 25, 2011, 12:25 AM
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scalziand scalziand is offline
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A new parking garage in Chicago has wind turbines built into it. They are vertical axis but have a spiral shaped blade to even out the torque produced. Even with that improvement I don't think it works very well though.


harryc

BOA Tower was supposed to have a wind turbine on it, but it got scrapped for some reason.
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Old Posted Oct 25, 2011, 4:00 AM
Rizzo Rizzo is offline
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The greenway garage turbines are almost never running. The chamfered corner was not a good idea. Had they placed them up and over the sidewalk (paid the city for air rights above the sidewalk) those things would be turning like crazy.

Winds in downtown Chicago reliably travel parallel to the buildings, they do not move diagonally at intersections. So those turbines are more sheltered than anything.

Small rooftop turbines are good. They are free of obstructions and easy to repair. Their smaller size does have a large enough impact on the building's structure.

Integrated turbines were a fad in the 2000's of placing large turbines between two buildings, or cutting a hole in the center for a turbine. It's best practice to avoid that nowadays because it's extremely costly to isolate supports for the turbine so the building structure is not damaged from vibration. They also can produce sounds audible to occupants on the interior and movement of the turbine can be uncomfortable to look at. Usually floors where the turbines are visible are unused or its integrated creatively so there are no direct sightlines.
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