Update on Shawn Frayne — Windbelt now a Humdinger
True to the saying “Build it and they will come,” I reported on Shawn Frayne’s Windbelt in my last post and boy, did they ever come. This is evidently the sort of thing that you, the public, are looking for, according to the number of comments that this article received as well as the number of referrals from Digg, StumbleUpon, Hugg, etc.
As an update to that article, I caught wind from the good people at Ecogeek that Shawn has started a company by the name of Humdinger Wind Energy to market his invention.
This may or may not be the case, but I’m hoping that the name of Frayne’s company reflects a move to rename the windbelts as “humdingers”, as in, “Man, that’s a fancy little humdinger you got there, charging your cellphone and powering your radio.”
A little background from the Humdinger site:
Shawn Frayne, a member of a team from MIT and Petite Anse working in the area, recognized that instead of kerosene lamps, white LEDs powered by a very inexpensive wind generator might be able to better light homes and schools in the area. However, when Shawn tried to design this affordable, turbine-based wind generator, he hit a brick wall: turbine technology is too inefficient at these scales to be a viable option.
It appears as though developer kits are coming soon as well, though details are sparse. Suffice to say, they will come in a box and be useful for “schools, researchers and independents…”
On a side note, here is short video of Shawn speaking at the recent Popular Mechanics Breakout Conference:
True indeed Shawn, we all do some of our best thinking when boxed into a corner.
If harder problems make for better inventions, we are living in some exciting times.
- Curtiss Martin
Curtiss P. Martin grew up in a geodesic dome on the side of a mountain in Southern Appalachia. Now he serves as ScribeMedia's clean technology editor in a tall building in downtown Manhattan.
Lets build a car with a long tapered tunnels and capture the wind to make multiple vibrating windbelt generators. Will thre be enough to generate automobile battery charges.? I visualize a small gas engine to get up to speed and tunnel dampers to control wind speed to the windbelts.
I too have been contemplating the concept of using a unit of a couple of hundred of the windbelt generators working in unison behind the front grill of a light weight hybrid vehicle such as prius, but instead of using a gas engine at all, could the vehicle create enough energy say once it reaches 20 mph or so from its battery pack to revert not to the gas powered engine but to the power from the 200 or so winbelts to supply the power for the electric drive and charge the battery pack of the vehicle. Since the unit would have very little wind resistance it shouldn’t at to the wind resistance of the vehicle.
Second Comment: The sample I saw demonstrated had the button generator on one end, why not put one on both ends to double the voltage output and then create the individual windbelt units so that they can easily be connected side by side with built in electrical connectors so they increase the voltage output as you connect more and more units in series, or parallel. That way you can create any voltage output needed. These could be assembled on pivoting platform with a rudder similar to what windmills have to keep the unit facing optimally toward the greatest source of wind.