Ca 1999 a big wind funnel turbine was built in New Zealand... The big idea died. If you know why, send me an email Here, for your edification, some historic texts and images:
The Vortec vision - a world powered by renewable energy. A vision increasingly shared by the global community whether government, industry and environmentalists alike.
Our timing couldn't be better.
Our wind turbine technology, first conceived by the USA Aerospace Giant Northrop Grumman and further developed by Vortec Energy, has the potential to revolutionise the world's renewable energy sector, at a time when the world's energy generators are looking for a more economic renewable energy solution.
While wind turbines have been around for years, the Vortec is a paradigm shift. A technology solution that generates more wind power at less unit cost.
We're about to commercialise the Vortec technology internationally, and we're seeking strategic partners who can see that the Vortec is going to be a very, very big thing.
Grumman research
In the 1970's USA and the western world experienced the first of the "oil shocks" where oil prices, principally originating from the Middle East, rose very significantly and rapidly. The US Department of Energy set about to investigate oil alternatives including renewables and Grumman Aerospace (now Northrop Grumman) was one company that was contracted to come up with a windpower solution.
Grumman Aerospace worked on the project during the late 1970's and early 1980's and advanced the concept of the Diffuser Augmented Wind Turbine(DAWT). It is estimated that some US $40.0 million was expended on the project. Grumman proved comprehensively that by using their DAWT design, that they were able to achieve air velocity speed up resulting in a augmentation when compared to a bare wind turbine of similar blade diameter. Grumman did extensive wind tunnel tests but did not build a field model. Grumman had also failed to effectively come up with an economic construction material although interestingly they had identified ferro-cement as a suitable material. In the 1980's the oil crisis was considered largely over and the project was shelved at this time.
Ten years on Miles Fox from New Zealand was researching renewable energy projects and came across the Grumman research. Miles had a strong background in working with ferro-cement and recognised the potential of applying that technology to construct the diffuser Grumman had designed. Miles (now with the assistance of Robin Johannink) came to an arrangement with Robert Alexander and Associates who were and are world renowned expert structural engineers. They had developed a revolutionary product known as "High Tensile Wire Reinforced Fibrous Cement" (HT Ferro) which has been used over a number of years for the construction of barges, water reservoirs and sea vessels both domestically and internationally. Armed with this agreement an approach was made to Grumman. After a year's negotiation and recognition by their licensing director (an ex naval architect) that Vortec had the missing link in construction economics, Grumman awarded Vortec with worldwide rights to their DAWT technology on a licensing and royalty arrangement.
Vortec's objective was then to build a field model to prove the Grumman concept and design. The result has been that Vortec Energy has constructed the world's first field-sized Diffuser Augmented Wind Turbine, Waikaretu,. The unit is essentially a prototype and demonstrator unit with a rotor blade diameter of 7.3 metres. (Hence the name Vortec 7). It is up and running and located on the west coast of the North Island, 110km south of Auckland in New Zealand.
Vortec 7 design
Ken Foreman, the team leader at Grumman during the DAWT project, was engaged as a consultant to Vortec Energy. He specified the key aspects of diffuser geometry and drive-train sizing. Foreman's predictions for power output were 5.5 times the power of a bare turbine of the same rotor diameter, resulting from a uniform velocity speed-up of 2 across the blade inlet plane.
Design & manufacture of the Vortec Seven demonstrator components took place in 1996. Various New Zealand and International consultants & contractors were engaged for the project.
The diffuser was fabricated from high tensile fibre-reinforced ferro-cement, a material used previously in vessel hull, pontoon & onshore tank structures. The drive-train was designed with a conventional layout of a fail-safe brake on the low speed shaft, a single stage gearbox coupled to a synchronous generator. Blade pitch was altered manually on the Vortec Seven, between test runs.
Full band variable speed operation is provided by rectification & line commutated inverter connection to the grid. However while testing, generator power is dissipated to a resistor bank for smooth electrical loading. Nash (1997) provides further design & construction details.
The parameters of interest, which characterise the performance of the DAWT, are the velocity speed up at the turbine plane, the diffuser exit pressure coefficient and the rotor disc loading. These parameters together determine the power performance of a DAWT. The Vortec Seven was comprehensively instrumented in order to measure these key parameters (Figure 2).
Negotiations commenced for the site of the first Vortec Turbine in Australia [12/7/99 11:14:04 AM] Primergy announced as Australian Licensee [12/7/99 11:13:44 AM] European site and Licensee negotiations commenced [12/7/99 10:51:59 AM] Negotiations underway with several potential strategic global technology partners [12/7/99 10:51:38 AM]
NEW ZEALAND: NZ TURBINE DEVELOPER SAYS IT PREPARING FOR 37M AUST WIND ROTOR.
Wellington, May 25 NZPA - Auckland-based wind turbine developer Vortec Energy says it is developing a larger-scale test model in preparation for its first full-scale prototype planned for next year. Two full-scale "pre-production" demonstrator machines will be built, one sited in Europe the other in Australia, possibly connected directly to the electricity grids. Site selection is underway. First, the company is building two different fibreglass "funnels" or diffusers, for a test machine with a 2m diameter "throat" funnelling wind onto turbine blades, with the first due for completion in July. This will be used to confirm calculations based on wind-tunnel trials already carried out at Auckland University's Tamaki wind tunnel, and will model the 37.3m demonstration turbine planned for 2001, which is expected to generate 1000 kilowatts, or 1 megawatt. Vortec's turbine developers told today's annual conference of the Wind Energy Association in Wellington that the first test model would undergo extensive field tests at the company's test site at Waiakaretu, 110km south of Auckland.
A second configuration of the model is being built to test designs for a proposed micro turbine suitable for small-scale power generation. The developers, Emily Rudkin, Derek Philips, and Trevor Nash, presented a paper at the conference proposing four distinct markets for the turbine technology: land-based grid-connected turbines, offshore windfarms, small wind turbines and underwater turbines. They said emerging plans by European countries such as Belgium for big windfarms offshore in places such as the North Sea appeared particularly suitable for the Vortec design. Other offshore windfarms were already installed in Denmark, Sweden, Holland, and Britain, while Germany had plans to use wind energy in both the Baltic and the North Sea. Large offshore machines, with 125m rotors generating five megawatts, were already on the drawing board in some countries, but Vortec believed its designs were suited to achieving similar performances from smaller turbines with reduced height and blade size.
Vortec was also investigating the possibility of embedding magnets into the rim of the turbine so that it could also act as a generator, but more work was needed to cope with the high velocities at the blade rim.
A worldwide market for small wind turbines producing less than 50 kilowatts of electricity was growing rapidly.
There was also scope for small turbines to be used for "net billing" where they were connected to the power grid. When the wind blew, the consumer's power meter effectively "ran backwards" and reduced the net amount owed for electricity.
The Vortec staff said they were also eyeing power generation from water currents. In remote areas electricity could be generated from turbines submerged in rivers and canals, while island communities could supplement diesel generation with undersea turbines.
NEW ZEALAND: VORTEC WIND TURBINE DEVELOPERS EYEING UNDERWATER TURBINE.
Wellington, May 25 - Wind turbine developer Vortec Energy is looking at expanding its technology into underwater electricity generation. Preliminary work has been done by the Auckland company on adapting its innovative wind-powered generators to operate in rivers and canals, such as waterways feeding South Island hydro-electric power schemes.
Vortec researcher Emily Rudkin told the Wind Energy Association's annual conference in Wellington today that the technology shift also had potential to generate electricity for coastal and island communities from tidal flows and marine currents. Underwater turbines offered some advantages over wind-powered systems, she said. They were quieter, offered fewer problems in terms of cluttering landscape aesthetics, did not have to cope with gusts, and the denser medium, water, made it possible to extract more energy. "It's a guaranteed source - as long as the rivers flow and the moon and the sun give us tidal flows," she said.
Ms Rudkin said underwater trials using an early Vortec design suggested a 2m diameter turbine in a current of two cubic metres per second, should deliver 12 kilowatts, and a current of three cubic metres per second might deliver 40 kilowatts. But there were a lot of issues that would need further research - particularly how such devices might be anchored. Vortec also announced that it was developing a larger-scale test model in preparation for its first full-scale prototype planned for next year.
Ms Rudkin and fellow Vortec researcher Derek Philips presented a paper at the conference proposing four distinct markets for turbine technology: land-based grid-connected turbines, offshore wind farms, small wind turbines and underwater turbines. Plans by European countries such as Belgium for big wind farms offshore in places such as the North Sea appeared particularly suitable for the Vortec design, they said.
Offshore wind farms were already installed near Denmark, Sweden, Holland, and Britain, while Germany had plans to use wind energy in the Baltic and the North Sea. A worldwide market for small wind turbines producing less than 50 kilowatts of electricity was growing rapidly. More than 150,000 small turbines of other designs had been installed in China, but there was another 60 million people still without electricity in remote areas. There was also scope for small turbines to be used for "net billing" where they were connected to the power grid. When the wind blew, the consumer's power meter effectively "ran backwards" and reduced the net amount owed for electricity. NZPA WGT kca pjm rap.
Last week the company signed its maiden licensing agreement with Australian energy company Primergy. The latter has rights to market the Vortec technology to power companies in Australasia. It also has restricted agreements to sell Vortec to other places. Bruce Sheppard, a key investor in Vortec and in Mr Johannink's other company, Pacific Lithium, said that with the licensing agreement signed Vortec would start to look interesting. For Vortec, the past 18 months had been spent finding a solution to correct the flaw in assumptions used by Grumman for its Diffuser Augmented Wind Turbine technology. This technology was supposed to raise the wind turbine's output based on drawing air through a wider air space on the width of the turbine's blade. "They assume wrongly that through the drawing in of the air, that would be evenly spread through the whole space of the blade."
In fact the air was concentrated on the tips of the blade, he said. "What we have done is we have been able to widen the bandwidth at which the speed up at the tips is being experienced. That brought that speed from the tips a lot closer to the centre of the blade [or the diffuser]." The team at Vortec had also made the turbine more economically viable by designing new construction material for the turbine, also based on the creation of an inlet which improves the economics of the turbine.
This time round, Vortec hopes it has got the mathematics right.
Mr Johannink said there was still a 10 per cent chance that computer estimates on the turbines' capabilities could under perform.
But he is a lot more confident as two outside sources of research - the University of Auckland and Gifu Institute in Japan - churned out comparable figures.