Dyson, the same guy who invented the bagless vacuum cleaners, has now come out with a bladeless fan:

http://www.time.com/time/health/arti...931455,00.html


That makes me wonder - could similar principles be used to come up with a bladeless wind turbine? Some environmentalists are concerned that wind turbine blades could pose a hazard to birds. I'm wondering if Dyson's approach couldn't be used to rectify that?

Also, many residential areas might have zoning laws against things like wind turbines, but if they could be made bladeless then perhaps they might be exempted from such restrictions.

Is such a concept possible? If so, would such a device prove to have comparable efficiency to standard wind turbines?

Read the description of how it works and then let us know how it would work in reverse.

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Interesting invention, I've no idea whether it could be used as a wind turbine, but my first thought upon reading about it is that this seems to be a device to move air, whereas turbines work more like propellers than fans, they want to be moved by the air. So I don't know.

There are already so many weird and wacky Windmill designs though... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconve..._wind_turbines.

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Well, I suppose that instead of using Bernoulli's to act as an "air-mulitiplier", it would have to act as an air concentrator.

Well, the true principle could indeed be used for a power plant.

The "bladeless" fan isn't actually bladeless--it just hides the blades inside the vertical tube.

Now, take a look at the Solar Updraft Tower concept. It also hides the blades inside the vertical tube.

So there you go--no exposed blades, so no bird strikes.

Except for chimney swifts...

Dysen's fan isn't very efficient, so it's not likely to be used as any sort of propulsion device.

Why not cages, like the usual household fan? Too heavy?

imagine a 300 foot tall version of this.
now imagine dozens of them in a field somewhere..

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Somebody might want to have somestandard blades on the outside for an added effect during high winds--a two-fer.

How about like this?
Take the skin off the dish, and duplicate the superstructure as a clamshell.

As far as the fan, I am leery of the ad.
No fan, sure, but an impeller can accumulate just as much dust. And what happens when that dust clogs the insides of those little pores?
And I would like to know Watts and volume of airflow. Sure it multiplies the flow, but what is that. They do describe it as a "draft" and not a "breeze".

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And dust will accumulate in the little bladed fan in the bottom.

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Hey, I think I found something - a wind turbine without big blades:

http://greenlivingideas.com/topics/a...-3-times-power

It seems to concentrate the flow of wind into a smaller cross-sectional area, and vaguely resembles a jet engine.

It has blades, but they're just not as big - which is kind of like Dyson's "bladeless" fan concept.

neat idea for a fan if u your the kind of person who wears an ipod for a fashion accessory

the fan is hidden in the base and just blasts out are through the gaps in the ring


bit like sticking a cardboard box over a traditional fan....i can see the apeal...i think we are wary of spinning blades and this does away with that fear

neat design 10 out of 10 for reinventing the wheel...however a rumble not a hiss is kinder to the human ear as it takes it out of speaking frequencies

its also one reason Harley sound cool and mosquitoes sound annoying
(the other is that low frequency is associated with large = alpha male display)

lol, you're avatar made that doubly scary to think about for some reason. Just picturing that face describing that.

This design is nothing more than the low-pressure turbine, or expansion section of your average jet engine.

The claim is that your average wind turbine only extracts 50% of the energy flowing past it while operating only 1/3 of the time.

The problem is that your average wind turbine's cross-section is very large, and it taps that cross area with a comparatively inexpensive design.

By contrast, to build a dragonfly large enough to harness 1/3 the cross-section area, thereby making it as productive as a standard turbine, would require a very large and expensive unit.

Therefore, the cost for the same level of energy production would be significantly higher.

When it comes to energy production, efficiency isn't everything. In fact, it's not much of a consideration at all, unless you're dealing with limited or expensive resources.

For abundant resources like the wind, life-cycle cost/kW-hr, however, is the only consideration, and that's where this design fails.

Now! For much denser mediums, such as water, this design makes perfect sense, and has been used for decades to provide water turbine auxillary electrical power while being towed behind sailboats.

Mr Dyson will sell you a device to suck the dust out of there. You can use it to clean the rest of the house as well, apparently.

This might work better http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Shark+-+...=1218115622560 I think there was a version that allows the lower section to drop down to floor level.