After four years of planning and developing their idea, engineers and designers from Syracuse University and Impact Technologies are ready to capture the wind and turn it into a sustainable energy source. 

The School of Architecture, the L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science and Impact Technologies, a company that has already found alternative ways to use wind energy, have created the Clean Energy Collaborative. They expect to have prototypes for their wind turbine around campus next year, said Michael Pelken, a professor in the School of Architecture and research fellow for the Syracuse Center of Excellence.

‘When I first started working here, I had some ideas about harnessing wind technologies,’ Pelken said. He got in touch with Thong Dang, a professor in the mechanical and aerospace engineering department, in 2007, and the two have been working together ever since.

The prototype Pelken and his team designed is a way to catch wind through a vertical turbine with blades that store the energy. The turbine is shorter than traditional windmill-style turbines and rotates on a vertical axis to capture the most amount of wind.

Their prototype, the Self-Sustaining Street Light, is an alternative form of energy in which wind is captured and stored during the day and then used during the night to provide illumination for a light post. Pelken said he hopes to start getting real-world data from this prototype by next year. 

After Pelken and Dang developed the principle and started the engineering work, a group of students from the engineering and architecture departments developed various components of the light post and helped to build a functioning model, Pelken said.

Laura Graham, a graduate student studying mechanical engineering and aerospace, worked on the Self-Sustaining Street Light project during her senior year at SU last spring. She said she had heard of the background and the plan behind the project, and she wanted to be part of the process because it interested her.

‘We had to optimize the design of the light post to make it work in Syracuse, then manufacture and build it,’ Graham said. ‘We then came up with a prototype and worked on every aspect of that.’ 

Graham said working on the project with other students helped her learn more about wind technology. She said they put up anemometers, which measure wind and solar power, to collect data around campus and then compared the results from SU to other parts of the country to get a better idea of generating wind energy at low wind speeds.

From this research, the group found that the most wind energy could be generated on South Campus, Pelken said. The prototypes will most likely be placed on South Campus because of this, he said.

The main difference between the Self-Sustaining Street Light and other wind energy designs is that the Self-Sustaining Street Light can be used in an urban setting like SU because it does not matter which direction the wind comes from, Pelken said. It can all be captured through their prototype, he said.

‘There are more turbulences in urban areas with changing wind directions,’ Pelken said. ‘We can use our prototype even at very low wind speeds, so it will be more effective in an urban setting.’ 

The cost of making and implementing the turbine is currently unknown, Pelken said, because it is still in the prototype stage, and the amount of energy one light post can provide will set the price. 

Pelken said: ‘We have a grand proposal pending and are also applying for outside funding.’

hawentz@syr.edu

 

Published on December 6, 2010 at 12:00 pm