The O-Wind Turbine has nabbed the James Dyson Award 2018, earning a cash prize of £30,000 and £5,000 for their university department.
The omnidirectional wind turbine is designed to work in the middle of big cities and is set “take urban energy harvesting to another level”.
The Turbine was created by Lancaster University students Nicolas Orellana and Yaseen Noorani. It designed specifically for high-density urban environments instead of the open fields where turbines are typically located.
Engineering can change lives by helping people solve problems
Urban architecture poses a problem for existing wind tech. Tall buildings throw wind flows into chaos and makes existing turbines – which can only capture wind travelling in one direction – useless.
O-Wind Turbine is able to capture wind from all directions and the unit can attach to balconies or the sides of buildings where wind speeds will be high. This would mean people living in apartments could generate their own electricity.
The prototype O-Wind Turbine is 25 centimetres in diameter. It works by having vents cut into the surface that which allow wind to flow in from all directions and spin the sphere on a single axis (like a globe).
The O-Wind Turbine already beat out other inventions in the UK division of the James Dyson Award 2018 and has now been crowned the global grand prize winner of the competition.
