WE REDEFINE WIND ENERGY BY RECYCLING UNTAPPED SOURCES OF WIND IN URBAN ENVIRONMENT
The Challenge
Global warming and air pollution: Our planet is facing a global challenge and WindCycle wants to make a big contribution to eliminate the use of fossil fuels and significantly reduce its devastating long-term effects on the environment and all other life forms. We firmly believe that our work will make a difference. We define the challenge as addressing important goals:
Carbon Emission in Hong Kong
Hong Kong have set ambitious plans to reach carbon intensity target of 65% to 70% by 2030, and carbon neutrality before 2050. Currently, about two-thirds of Hong Kong’s carbon emissions come from electricity generation. Coal accounts for about one quarter of the fuel mix for electricity generation in 2020. In the coming decade, the two power companies will continue to replace coal-fired generating units with gas-fired ones, but using natural gas for electricity generation is still producing significant amount of carbon emissions. We need to develop ZERO-CARBON technologies on renewables energy sources in order to achieve more aggressive carbon reduction targets and strive to achieve carbon neutrality before 2050, we must substantially increase the proportion of zero-carbon energy in the overall fuel mix for electricity generation. Countries with available land and sea have installed Wind Farms of the Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines type (HAWT) which requires large extensions of land/sea and very costly infrastructure. This is not an efficient solution for Hong Kong due to the limitation of land available for wind farms. Other problems with HAWT technology are:
CO2 Reduction
Reducing carbon emissions to a sustainable level, a.k.a. a net zero carbon footprint.
Good Life
We believe that clean and affordable energy is vital for our society to prosper.
Transition to EV
By 2035, no new registration of fuel-propelled vehicles will be allowed in Hong Kong. This transition into EVs requires that the EV Charging Stations and Grid Energy in general need to originate from renewable sources.
It makes no sense to have EVs powered by electricity generated from coal or gas.
High Noise Pollution
Created by the rapidly spinning wing tips. In a horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT), the entire wing has a uniform angular velocity, therefore the wing tip has the highest linear velocity. This very high wing tip speed is a source of noise pollution.
Sustainable Energy Generation
By 2050, Hong Kong can substantially increase the proportion of renewable energy</b> in their total energy use. Renewables can make up 60% or more of total final
energy consumption.
Bird fatalities
In spite of the fact that wind technology has a bird fatality rate per GWh of energy produced around 15 times lower than conventional power plants wind farms sited improperly next to rare bird habitats can be a source of tragedy.
SOLUTION: Our Vertical Axis Wind Turbine for Urban Environment solve all these problems
Why Wind Energy in Urban Environments?
Among all renewable resources, wind energy has been proven to be a relatively matured technology and has tremendous potential in commercialization and mass production. Today the major application of wind power is electricity generation from large grid-connected wind farms. With the expansion of power grid and the reduction of electricity scarce areas, small-scale wind turbine has now been applied in fields such as city road lighting, mobile communication base stations, offshore aquaculture and sea water desalination in several countries.
WindCycle turbines can be sited in urban environments, specially for Cities like Hong Kong due to territorial limitations, where traditional wind farms requiring large areas of land or sea to be deployed are not a viable option.
This means that WindCycle turbines can be sited wherever winds are generated in the city by moving vehicles or particular building structure that produce increase in natural wind speed.
The WINDCYCLE Concept
WindCycle’s wind turbines use a vertical-axis wind turbine connected electricity poles. As the energy of the wind causes the turbine to rotate a generator connected to the rotor convert that energy into usable electricity.
WindCycle turbines can be sited in areas that are currently out of reach for traditional wind turbines (that requires large areas of land or sea to be deployed. This means that WindCycle turbines can be sited wherever winds are generated in the city by moving vehicles or particular building structure that produce increase in natural wind speed.
Research and scientific reports also show that vertical-axis wind turbines have a high structural limit and can be built larger than horizontal-axis wind turbines.
The WINDCYCLE Advantages
Recycling Untapped
Wind Energy
WindCycle can produce renewable wind energy from untapped sources of wind in urban environments like Highways, Subway Metro Lines, Road Tunnels, particular Buidling aerodynamics, and more.
Power Transmission in-situ:
As the energy is converted from wind to electricity into the grid right in the city electricity poles and urban centers, there is no need to build new and expensive infrastructure for power transmission as in the case of wind farms onshore or offshore that require heavy infrastructure to bring the energy to city centers where the electricity is used.
Vertical turbines always point in the right direction
As a part of WindCycle’s concept of simplicity, our vertical turbine does not have to point in any specific direction. Although this might sound insignificant, it eliminates the need for complex machinery and directional controls. Let’s bring costs down!
Compact wind farms
The typical spacing constraints on conventional HAWT wind farms do not fully apply to WindCycle’s vertical-axis wind turbine (VAWTs). It is even possible to increase the power by placing the wind turbines close to each other in the crosswind direction and use the flow interaction.
Social Impact
- Lower noise pollution
- Less bird fatalities
- Easily adaptable to urban environments
Lower Costs
The WindCycle concept is based on simplicity. This cuts production costs and maintenance costs to provide WindCycle owners with an attractive and cost-efficient solution.
Innovation & Efficiency
Vertical axis wind turbine technology implementable that is durable and reliable. Almost 30% more energy production per year compared to similar horizontal axis wind turbine under same wind condition.
LCOE
Investment and operational costs reduced compared to horizontal axis wind turbines.
Technology
We Craft Elegant Solutions with Powerful Technology
The proposed technology is characterized by a very high efficiency.
The product efficiency has been calculated with computational fluid dynamics software, recreating real behaviour of air around a rotating geometry thanks to applying Navier-Stokes equations together with a proper turbulence model (in this case k-omega SST).
Computational Fluid Dynamics
It is a computer based tool for simulating the behavior of systems involving
fluid flow, heat transfer, and other related physical processes.
It works by solving the equations of fluid flow (in a special
form) over a region of interest, with specified conditions on
the boundary of that region.
WindCycle performs CFD analysis in all its wind turbines designs as well in environment simulations for specific aerodynamics scenarios involving fluid dynamics on roads, building, tunnels, etc…
Urban Vertical Axis Wind Turbines
VAWT Recycling Wind Speed created by passing by vehicles on the roads and highways and bringing back energy into the grid right in the city center.
IoT Performance Monitoring and Connectivity
Internet of Things (IoT) sensor technology is able to provide constant data on the functioning of turbines.
We can monitor and regulate the whole operation of these urban wind turbines to reduce the cost of maintaining using predictive machine- learning algorithms, IoT and cloud computing.
Plasma Actuation for Aerodynamic Efficiency
Dynamic stall control for vertical axis wind turbines (VAWT) based on pulsed dielectric-barrier-discharge (DBD) plasma actuation, drastically improve aerodynamic efficiency and overall performance of the turbines.
Our R&D team is working on this powerful feature for our next VAWT design which will bring wind turbines to the next level.