Wind turbines seem to be on steroids these days — they’re getting bulkier and heavier, and that makes them more expensive to ship and more complex to assemble. But a startup called Boulder Wind Turbines says it has figured out a new way to lighten the load.
The Colorado company, founded in 2009, has engineered a generator that incorporates a circuit board design as one of its main components. A generator’s motor is made up of a rotating component called the rotor and a stationary part called the stator. In a typical generator today, both the rotor and the stator are made with iron wrapped with copper coils to create the magnetic field for producing mechanical energy.
But what Boulder Wind Power has done is to engineer a different kind of stator by printing copper wires onto fiber glass and laminating layers of fiber glass together to create a stator that looks, and works, like a printed circuit board, said Andy Cukurs, the startup’s CEO. This design doesn’t use iron, but it does add a magnet to the whole generator to create that magnetic field. In the end, what you get is a stator sandwiched between the magnet-lined rotor.
The printed circuit board design, Cukurs said, is “light weight, and it translates into cost savings because you don’t have to build a heavy foundation and tower. The wind industry uses weight as a proxy for cost.”
via GigaOM
December 14, 2012
