By CityMetric staff
April 14,2015, CityMetric
Today in crazy architecture news: a firm has designed a giant, circular wind turbine, which also happens to be inhabitable.
We can imagine a few potential objections – most obvious among them being, “What was that? I can’t hear you over the sound of the turbine.” But the wheel, planned for the port city of Rotterdam in southern Holland, would use a wind power technology with no moving parts, and should therefore be completely silent.
The electrostatic wind energy converter, developed in 2013 by a consortium of Dutch companies and academics, uses a combination of wind and water to generate power. Thin metal tubes across the turbine’s surface contain electrodes and nozzles which throw out a fine spray of water droplets. These are naturally attracted to the positive eletrodes, but are displaced by the wind blowing through the structure. This increases their potential energy, and it is this energy that can then be harnessed as electricity. Here’s a diagram: Read more…
