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Renewable energy is very much the future of not just the national energy
portfolio but the world energy portfolio. Turbines that are designed right now,
they're three blades, they face the wind. Very efficient, where we have an
issue is if we want to build extreme scale wind turbines.
As you get these larger wind turbines, your blades end up becoming more flexible and if you're
upwind then when the wind comes in and hits those blades, they can curve
backwards and then it can hit that tower and destroy the entire turbine.
We need a turbine that's more resilient and also larger so we can take it even more energy.
The palm tree is a fantastic example of something very very tall is
lightweight and can bend with the wind.
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So we just took those concepts that nature had already presented to us and adapted
our blade design, moved it downwind, so it could cone and morph like a palm tree.
These winds that come in, there's more aligned with the blades and they can
bend away from the tower and then we can make them larger and larger and that way
you can capture more power.
We spent several years designing this now we've actually fabricated a prototype.
This 10-story tall prototype is located at
National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado where the winds can be up to
100 miles an hour, so it represents a condition where there's extreme winds
that you would have to be resilient against.
As a student at the University of Virginia,
I came out to Colorado for these testings to be able to see if this
model is going to react as the full-scale rotor would react.
If it performs as good as we think it could and should, we would then go to the next
level and produce a turbine that's even larger
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The end goal for this is actually to make it into manufacturing and have
entire farms producing power at very high efficiency and at very low cost
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Being able to actually see our project go from us just sitting on a computer to
having something physically there is super rewarding, we can actually see our
work come to life and it's something that other people in the future will use
and learn from.
This could revolutionize wind energy not just for the state, not
just for the nation, but for the world.
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