Continued... LATEST NEWS

"Stealth Pump" manufacturing.

The "Stealth" pump is the most easy to manufacture waterpump of all.

I have been conferring with Rolf Schilling, our talented CAD engineer, on the pump casing to ensure that the tooling path is simple and to minimise the number of molds needed. We have eliminated at least one molded part for each of the Pool and Spa pumps.

We have proven the "Stealth" will be the easiest of all water pumps to manufacture. In fact we make it our business to make sure that any of our technologies are able to be manufactured easily and economically.

The Jetfan.

The Jetfan contributes to noise reduction for any pump including the "Stealth". After 6 months of investigation in Asia no one could work out a way to manufacture Jetfans short of welding individual metal blades onto the hub due to the blade overlap which would preclude its viability. That is now history.

We designed a helical plane within each Jetfan blade. We then thickened the blade material at certain areas to get the required fluid cross sectional area reduction needed for performance and to keep within the spirit of the patent.

The injected liquid plastic, upon hardening, results in each blade becoming a cam when the fan is pulled linearly thus causing the fan to autorotate as it disengages from the mold (total time 16 seconds).

Simple, yes, but only in hindsight. It took mostly mental gymnastics to solve the problem and when the tooling was built to enable manufacture it worked perfectly first time.

That always has to be our approach to what we do. Now we have in a similar way solved any manufacturing concerns regarding the "Stealth" pump.

Orbitalpump

The Orbitalpump, our electro-mechanical pumping "Shortcut", that is both a new type electric motor and pump in one with no shaft, shaft seals or bearings is being dealt with in the same way, ...inventively. However in the case of the Orbitalpump we are going to work with a leading University (we can tell you more later) for its development due to its wide range of applications including as the hub of Circulation Control (CC) wind turbines for generation of 3 times lift on the blades.

To understand it more, please read Lift and the Coanda Effect. and Chanin’s thesis, based on work done in the NASA Ames 80 X 40 feet wind tunnel.

Almost all the technical and manufacturing problems we have given to experts to solve have not been and we always end up solving them ourselves. I cannot see that changing much.

But all the better as it enables us to keep control of all aspects of our technologies.

Efficiency of wind turbines is limited, but there is a solution.

Engineers and other rational people know either by education or intuition and logic that a wind turbine cannot absorb all the energy from an airstream. All types of turbines rotate only reluctantly because their rotating shaft in turn has to push magnets through coils to generate an electric current. The electrons (electricity) possess inertia so they don’t move from zero to a considerable speed through the wire without resistance.

The wind turbine absorbs the kinetic energy (energy of motion) from the wind which rotates it. In effect the wind, having given up some of its kinetic energy, its speed, has to leave the aft side of the turbine traveling slower than it entered. To travel slower it has to fan out somewhat to a larger diameter.

To slow and deviate the trajectory of even some of the air is a balancing act because, if the air leaves the turbine at the same speed it entered, no power is absorbed from the air. The air rotates the turbine but it is also affected by the turbines resistance to it, i.e., the air is slowed. Conversely, if the air leaves too slowly a raised pressure impulse within the air mass travels in reverse direction to the flow direction, back through the turbine and impedes the speed of the entering flow so less power than optimum is absorbed from the airstream.

Betz' law says that you can only convert less than 16/27 (or 59%) of the kinetic energy in the wind to mechanical energy using a wind turbine.

Betz' law was first formulated by the German Physicist Albert Betz in 1919. His book "Wind-Energie" published in 1926 gives a good account of the knowledge of wind energy and wind turbines. Read more about it on wikipedia.

In addition, the above mentioned resistance means the turbine blades will not turn as fast as the wind wants to push them. Therefore the blades may stall which further reduces their efficiency. Obviously there can be better designs than others which maximize efficiency.

The bad news is that according to Betz Law the maximum efficiency is limited to 59%. At present the best wind turbines have a top efficiency of around 45%. That leaves a potential possible increase of around 31% over existing before the theoretical limit of 59% is reached.

It is unlikely that this present max efficiency of 45% will be increased by more than a slight margin since computerized fluid dynamics analysis (CFD) has rung about the last few % out of the existing conventional airfoils and wind turbine blades.

Now many new types of wind turbines are being invented and produced to attempt to increase the efficiency over the present 45% max. Some do not look at all like conventional Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines (in the industry, called a HAWT).

But keep in mind Betz Law! The principles still apply to all types wind turbines. 59% is approximately it.

CFD analysis and the human brain cannot improve conventional wings and wind turbine blades further simply because these airfoils possess inherent limitations.

However some human brains long ago worked out how to greatly improve an airfoils lifting capacity.

A flap under the trailing edge called a Gurney Flap improves lift. But by far the best way to improve lift is by applying the COANDA form of CIRCULATION CONTROL.

This generates three times the lift to the wind turbine blade. This is performed regularly by us, NASA, Office of Naval Research, Georgia Tech Research Institute among others. In Australia this work has been conducted by Professor Ahmed Noor at University of New South Wales.

Three times lift does not mean 300 % increase in efficiency. To produce the effect has a penalty called "parasitic losses" When these are deducted from the result you still end up with a massive increase in lift that results in a very large part of the allowable 31% efficiency increase that takes it far closer to the max 59% efficiency predicted by Betz Law.

Apart from the less effective Gurney Flap, their is no other way, full stop, to increase the efficiency of wind turbine blades by such a massive amount. Non technical decision makers need to know this. Present wind turbine installations obviously must proceed. But the next generation of wind turbines, employing Coanda Circulation Control should be now in the planning stages.

To understand it more, please read Lift and the Coanda Effect. and Chanin’s thesis, based on work done in the NASA Ames 80 X 40 feet wind tunnel.

Coming soon in NEWS: