Aeromine Technologies

Aereomine's key concept was a vertical airfoil arrangement that would allow for a good envelope of operating angles for a static turbine, eliminating the lion's share of mechanical complexity and expense of distributed small wind turbines. The edge of a building presents an interesting environment for a wind energy system if it can cope with some turbulence, which the vertical foils should theoretically help with. What's shown here is more of the latter day prototype work. There were a few conceptual and architectural elements that would have been extremely economical that ended up not working as well as theorized, so we moved to the dual horizontal axis rotor design as pictured. 

One of the changes that we were most excited about was the addition of stator elements. This would have added significant internal structure and stiffness, making the necessary hardware and joinery a much easier problemt to solve. Making the system adaptable to different roof structures was one of the main design goals, and reducing the complexity of the base mounting system was a big part of that. Reducing bending moments in all the elements with that additional structure was a tremendous help.

One of the major design elements was the rotor, which we iterated on several times. The foil optimization saw a good deal of change over the years. We ended up manually changing angle of attack or pitch (these terms are actually pretty muddy in the wind power world) to explore the design environment.

While we would have liked to integrate a simple electrical braking resistor setup on the three phases of a permanent magnet generator for shutdown, eventually it became clear that a fail-safe mechanical brake was necessary. The presence of electrical power in a disconnected system wasn't sufficiently safe. We ended up integrating a stock system, anticipating that down the road we could customize a solution with minimal power draw during operation. 

One of my roles at Aeromine was facilitating geometry generation for our fluids team. We went through quite a few parameterizations for the system so that they could perform design of experiments (DOE) on a variety of geometries and scenarios in chunk jobs with cloud CFD partners. Generating water tight geometry for CFD in a manner that is robust to a wide envelope of design change is actually a nontrivial problem! We were in the process of implementing a design that would use FRP pultrusions as the primary structure due to its high strength and economy, which is what is shown here.