Engineer works on typhoon turbine

Atsushi Shimizu is the engineer who created the typhoon turbine. It is the world's first typhoon wind turbine “designed to withstand he strongest tropical cyclone while harnessing its immense force.” The energy from one typhoon, said Shimizu, could power Japan for 50 years.

So what is so special about this turbine that enables it to harness such storms? It is based on conventional wind turbine functionalities, but ”an omnidirectional vertical axis is designed to withstand unpredictable wind patterns of tropical cyclones.” The engineer also incorporated something he call the Magnus effect. This is “the sideways force on a spinning object that pushes it in a direction perpendicular to the direction of the movement. This effect exerts control over the turbine blades.”

The current design reached 30 percent efficiency during simulations. Is this impressive? The fact that 30 percent does not measure up to commercial wind turbines managing 40 percent does not deter the engineer from further work and the number does not detract from what Shimizu accomplished, a turbine able to harness the energy from a typhoon.

In July 2016, the first prototype was installed in Okinawa. Now all the Challenergy team needs to test their creation's efficiency in real life is a typhoon.

Read more at Tech Xplore

Image Credit: Challenergy

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