A super-efficient and completely soundless wind turbine developed by a Dutch company aims to enable every household to generate its own wind energy.
Officially unveiled today, the shell-shaped Liam F1 Urban Wind Turbine offers much better efficiency compared with conventional designs. Its shape, modelled after the perfectly logarithmic spiral of a Nautilus shell, allows the turbine to always position itself at the best angle towards the direction of the wind, achieving efficiency which is about 80 per cent of what is theoretically possible.
With an average speed of wind of about 5m/s, the turbine generates about 1,500 kilowatt-hours of energy – about half of the consumption of a regular household. The Archimedes, the company behind the Liam F1 Urban Wind Turbine, believes that in combination with efficient solar panels, the turbine can make every household completely energy self-sustainable.
“When there is wind you use the energy produced by the wind turbine, when the sun is shining you use the solar cells to produce the energy,” Richard Ruijtenbeek, an engineer from The Archimedes, explained the company’s vision.
The company believes that the low energy yield together with the unpleasant and constant noise of conventional wind turbines is the major obstacle preventing a more widespread uptake of wind as a renewable energy source among users in towns and cities.
The turbine, officially unveiled today, has already attracted interest from all around the world. The company, which said had not originally believed the test results of the Liam F1 turbine as they seemed too good to be true, has already started developing a smaller version of the turbine for boats and lamp posts.
