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Wind Turbines, without the Turbines: Saphon Energy's Zero-Blade Technology

By Rain Noe - December 3, 2012

in Sustainable Design

I've read that during the Industrial Revolution, it took a special kind of mind to envision the types of actions machines could perform. For example, early attempts to create sewing machines attempted to mimic the act of two human hands passing and plucking a needle back and forth through fabric, and those attempts failed. The purely mechanical needle, hook and shuttle system still used today was what worked, and it was difficult for all but the most gifted to work those futuristic actions out on paper.

It takes a similarly rare level of brilliance to look not forward, but backward, to find an older technology that can solve a modern-day problem. And a Tunisian start-up company called Saphon Energy has done just that, by designing a wind-capturing device that eschews the windmill form factor—a 400-year-old invention—and going with one at least 5,000 years old: the sail.

Windpower is arguably the greenest of the green, but one reason it's not seeing massive uptake is that the turbine form factor is inherently problematic. They're expensive to manufacture, noisy, and inefficient. Saphon Energy's innovation is a simple disc-shaped sail that catches and dances in the breeze. The shifting energy this produces at the mounting point is captured and either stored or immediately converted to electricity.

Hassine Labaied, a Dubai banker with ties to Tunisia, was so smitten with the promise of Saphon Energy's "Zero-Blade Technology" that he quit his 12-year finance career to pursue, as it were, a career in sails and marketing. Now serving as Saphon's CEO, in the TED talk below he outlines the surprising statistics that make Zero-Blade look like a good bet:

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James Sinutay

7 years ago

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after spending 5 years, and failing to deliver a working prototype ... the same team at SAPHON ENERGY, are launching a new SCAM, called "TYER WIND".
based on the same inefficient kinematics. they just replaced the excentric dish, with 2 wings, mimicking hummingbirds.
Expect hummigbirds to file a class action for patent infringement ... haha ....

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Ct'd in CT

12 years ago

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A big debate was sparked over Kickstarter for just this kind of thing.... This is a great example on why more than slick animations and computer renderings are needed for investors (and for simple curious people like me).

Without giving away inventor secrets, I kinda wanna know how does this work. How does this thing transform, collect, and store energy? Both videos tell me close to nothing.

I guess I am one of the few fortunate that doesn't get nauseous or get headaches from wind turbines, but I do find watching grainy videos of a wobbly pie pan on a stick annoying unless I got something more to go off of.
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- James Sinutay
  
  7 years ago
  
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  5 years gone, and no working prototype ... for sure this is a SCAM to syphon investors money
  
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wr

12 years ago

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jocafa: try googling "wind turbine tv interference" or "wind farm tv interference". Wind turbines are giant rotating EM mirrors after all. Though it has to be a strictly localized effect.
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jocafa

12 years ago

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"The blade spinning scrambles tv and radio signal"
[citation needed]
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wr

12 years ago

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Scam.
Fake.
Snake oil.

Seriously, dude. You make an excellent blog about industrial design and small appliances, but you constantly lack engineering and scientific basis when it comes to engineered projects. Please, stop promoting obvious fakes. Two in a week is enough.

Why obvious?

You cannot break Betz's limit. It's not about turbines, it's about how much power you can extract from the wind without stopping it completely and clogging the flow. 59.3% in ideal theoretical conditions (laminar flow), anything above is unscientific fiction. Seriously, you should stop listening right after that claim. Obvious scam OR they don't understand a thing about aerodynamics. Either way their claim is a lie.

You cannot make traditional sail of any shape more efficient than turbine or, for sail's sake, Magnus rotor. It's all about laminar flow turning into turbulence beyound that sail's boundary.

You cannot make the attached hydraulic (and especially a piston-based hydraulic) energy conversion cycle mechanically more efficient than the direct link "rotor to generator". Energy losses at "sail to mechanic to hydro to accumulator to turbine/piston extractor to generator" will be immense. More moving parts, more links, more conversions, and hydraulics themselves are pretty inefficient at small scale. For instance, the most efficient hydroelectric turbines (and those are huge high-pressure turbines) operate at 90% efficiency. So even if they invent a two-way piston-based pump as efficient as such turbine (a small engineering miracle, indeed), you still lose 19% at storage and retrieval action, and the hydraulic accumulator itself will lose at least 5-10% more. Now add the generator's losses, and a couple of links between the sail and the pump - and voila, you're already below Betz's limit, and that's the mechanical part only.

You cannot get any sufficient amount of power from a few square meters sail, but also you cannot scale that thing up. Read links below for explanation.

Finally, that thing is sophisticated and expensive. Unstable power aisde, know what's the second biggest problems of modern wind turbines is? Small ROI and small EROI. The things are pretty cheap, but they produce far less energy per dollar, joule or kilo of metal invested than nuclear or thermal stations. Basically for your average wind turbine the ROI is just 300-400% over its complete lifetime without tax breaks, and wind power generates two _magnitudes_ more toxic waste per MWh than modern nuclear (calculated myself), or nearly three magnitudes more than next-gen nuclear. Now, that sail is attached to a huge system of mechanical links, hydraulic tanks, supports, and all. Even if it's just twice as expensive and heavy as your wind turbine, it gets econimically unviable with current interest rates.

More, fake patent claims included:

http://www.quora.com/Wind-Power/Are-stationary-circular-sails-the-future-of-wind-power
http://skeptoid.com/blog/2012/11/27/saphon-zero-blade-technology-cheap-efficient-wind-power/
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