In 1979 I had a pure R&D Company, Pantech Energy System in Long Island N.Y.
It was dedicated to research in Renewable Energies. One of which was Wind.
The first thing we did in this Field was to "Invent" a Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT)
Our first idea was to use a cyclically variable vane pitch. But later experiments showed that this was not necessary. With a fixed pitch the windmill ran well, being the only problem that it is NOT SELFSTARTING.
For large machines we had to tie the vanes with wires (As in the old biplane aircraft) to fight the centrifugal forces that tended to flex the vanes outwards.
Later, we thought that it would be a good idea to flex the vanes in the factory and eliminate the guy wires.
This is how we invented our windmill. We went to patent it and found out that it had been invented in the 30's by a wonderful french inventor, M Darrieus.
The funny thing of this story is that by the same time a Canadian Company and Alcoa Aluminium Patented (Falsely) The same idea and spent enormous amounts of money in its R&D (Including Sandia National Paboratories).
Fortunately, aware ot the patent, we did not further spend a single dollar, but thought a lot about it.
Why these VAWTs have NOT succeeded in the Market?
IMO, their best advantage was at the same time their Achiles Tendon. They can accept air from any point in the Horizon, if installed verically. Now it makes a lot of sense to install them directly on the groung in a very short tower. But due to the wind sheear the layers of wind closest to the ground have very little energy.
We studied the possibilit of installing them with its axis horizontal. Later we saw the possibility of adding many of such windmills in series, making a long string between tall posts,
Then, after some rough experiments, we found out that we could liminate one blade from each individual Darrieus. The system is well balanced and only needs counterweigths at the extremes.
These long lines of half Darrieus hanging from widely spaced tall towers can be made very long, installed along mountain divides and can be used as electric transmission lines that overcompensate their own losses. The towers are much less expensive than the typical towers because, in this case they can be guyed. One important feature of the Darrieus is that it takes air from one sense or its opposite, rotating always in the same sense.
They are not orientable, but this is not so bad. In most places most of the yearly energy of the WIND comes from just one direction one sense or its opposite.
For a relatively small installation, all we need is two short lines making an angle of 90º installed usually at one corner of our property.
For this machine we should balance the total yearly watt.hours against the OVERALL price and compare it with the
standard wind farms of OAWTs
Generators are in the owers
Chorete
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Darrieus Line
Re: Darrieus Line
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