Tag Archives: Wind

Typhoon-proof Wind Turbine

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While wind energy is rapidly increasing its market share across the world, wind turbines are not able to be constructed everywhere that they might be needed. A perfect example of this is Japan, where a traditional wind turbine would get damaged by typhoons. After the Fukushima disaster, though, one Japanese engineer committed himself to building a turbine specifically for Japan that can operate just fine within hurricane-force winds. (YouTube, embedded below.)

The “typhoon turbine” as it is known works via the Magnus effect, where a spinning object directs air around it faster on one side than on the other. This …read more

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The Engineering That Survives Hurricanes

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Florida is a great place to live, especially around January when it’s sunny and 24 degrees outside (76F) while all of your friends from back home are dealing with scraping ice off of their windshields every morning. In the late summer, though, this pleasant tropical paradise can sometimes take a turn for the worse, because Florida is one of the handful of places that frequently see some of the worst storms on the planet: hurricanes. As a Floridian myself, perhaps I can shed some light on some of the ways that the various local governments and their residents have taken …read more

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DIY Wind Turbine for Free Energy

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With electricity cost going up and the likes of British Gas hiking up their price, everyone could use a bit of free energy. There are a number of ways to harvest renewable energy including solar and wind, however, the cost of setting up a wind farm can be quite high. [Mr Tickles] has uploaded a video where he has a cheaper DIY method of making a DIY wind turbine.

His project uses a commercial ceiling fan as a turbine for converting the wind energy into electricity. PVC pipes are used to mount the entire thing such that it becomes portable. …read more

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The Most Straightforward Wind Turbine

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We can all use a little more green energy in our lives at home. So when [ahmedebeed555] — a fan of wind power — ran into durability troubles with his previous home-built turbine, he revised it to be simpler than ever to build.

Outside of the DC generator motor, the rest of the turbine is made from recycled parts: a sponge mop sans sponge, a piece from an old CD drive case acting as a rudder, the blades from a scrapped fan, and a plastic bottle to protect the motor from the elements. Attach the fan to the …read more

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Hacking Into…. A Wind Farm?

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Pick a lock, plug in a WiFi-enabled Raspberry Pi and that’s nearly all there is to it.

There’s more than that of course, but the wind farms that [Jason Staggs] and his fellow researchers at the University of Tulsa had permission to access were — alarmingly — devoid of security measures beyond a padlock or tumbler lock on the turbines’ server closet. Being that wind farms are generally  in open fields away from watchful eyes, there is little indeed to deter a would-be attacker.

[Staggs] notes that a savvy intruder has the potential to shut down or cause considerable — …read more

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Hacking Into…. A Wind Farm?

Posted on by

Pick a lock, plug in a WiFi-enabled Raspberry Pi and that’s nearly all there is to it.

There’s more than that of course, but the wind farms that [Jason Staggs] and his fellow researchers at the University of Tulsa had permission to access were — alarmingly — devoid of security measures beyond a padlock or tumbler lock on the turbines’ server closet. Being that wind farms are generally  in open fields away from watchful eyes, there is little indeed to deter a would-be attacker.

[Staggs] notes that a savvy intruder has the potential to shut down or cause considerable — …read more

Continue reading Hacking Into…. A Wind Farm?→