EWICON: bladeless wind generator

A few days ago on Habré news appeared that the Danish energy sector is now 25% dependent on wind generators . It is clear that wind generators are not a panacea, and these mechanisms have some disadvantages, including a large number of moving parts, wear of the blades, noise and so on. A few days ago, the Dutch company Mecanoo introduced a pilot model of an electrostatic wind generator, which generally does not have blades and moving parts.

In this device, water droplets emerging from horizontally placed nozzles are used as a source and energy storage device. Water droplets have a positive charge, and in the normal case, these drops are attracted to negatively charged electrodes / surfaces. But the system uses wind, which carries drops in the opposite direction, to positively charged electrodes. All this leads to an increase in the potential energy of a positively charged drop, and this energy is obtained when the drop hits a positively charged electrode.

As can be seen in the photo, the generator consists of a metal frame, inside which insulated tubes are placed in a horizontal position. Each tube contains nozzles and several electrodes. The video below shows how the system works. Unfortunately, the exact performance of such a "windmill" is not indicated, it is only said that the amount of generated energy depends on the number of drops of water, on the charge of the drops, on the wind speed and electric field strength.

In general, the idea is interesting, but the practical implementation, bringing energy in significant quantities, is still far away. Now a prototype system is located next to the University of Technology in Delft.



Via dvice