Airborne Wind Turbine Could Revolutionize Wind Power | EarthTechling

Cool stuff.

Airborne Wind Turbine Could Revolutionize Wind Power | EarthTechling

Potential order-of-magnitude enhancement of wind farm power density via counter-rotating vertical-axis wind turbine arrays

Fascinating paper using turbines to funnel wind to each other. By using several vertical turbines they manage to get more power per square meter ( the limiting factor for how much power we can get is how much land area we are willing to throw at using it).

Sky wind turbines

More high altitude wind turbines.

nifty ladder mill paper.

The Laddermill work in progress -

Bill gates on high altitude wind power

Bill Gates of all people has been making some intereasting incursions to the global engergy crisis [here]

Nesta more funding.

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Yes its a crazy idea but it should work

Odd week,
I've found a few patents which overlap quite a lot with what I'm thinking about, that was a bit of a down moment.

On the plus side I had a great meeting with Derek Taylor a lecturer from the OU who has been doing a broad range of eco projects and has done some fascinating work on using buildings to augment wind turbines. He definitely had his head on the right way and had some fantastic ideas to help push things on. His big suggestion was using a normal wind turbine during the proof of concept phase to be comparable. He also suggested trying the idea out in water and thinking about keeping the turbine at normal turbine heights before trying to go high ( and get all the aircraft problems sorted). I liked him very sane. It was he who made the crazy but workable statement. He also counciled  against relying on anometer data. Putting a real load on the turbine produces different result.

While we were chatting Godfrey Boyle the new professor turned up and also said he thought the idea was original but not with out merit. Definitly worth pursing in more detail. They both made a couple of offers which I'm not going to hold them to but the idea of getting a student to do some CFD work as floated. So in the end very very encouraging.

In the afternoon Dominc the Technology transfer office came over. He is all set up to do part 2 of the RCUK competition ( deadline mid march ) and told me the OU can cover patents but you need to fill in the form and wait for the OU to think about it and really have a reason for doing it (i.e exploitation in mind).  I told him the simple patent was out of the question and I need to think of something more sophisticated and detailed - perhaps when I've finished the next round of development.

After that I discovered Dominc is a manic iPhone user so we ended up having a great chat. Turns out the OU's biggest patentors are the biologists.

So what now - well no response from the airship people ( I think they have guessed I'm mad) but perhaps the existence of the previous patents means I can talk to people more freely.

I said to D. that I could go for writing the paper with the results and not jepodieze the patent with the research paper.