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anemoi

 

     Build a giant fan with a 300 foot blade span.  Raise it up about 300 feet off the ground and the prevailing winds will spin the fan and generate electricity.  Nice idea! 

    But what happens when you raise that much mass and torque so far off the ground?    Maintenance happens. . .    And you have to climb up 300 feet to fix it!         

        Nobody talks about that!

An Old Problem

    As with all InAmerica R&D, we start out with a problem to solve.  In this case, we stretch back almost three decades to reach the inspiration for Anemoi.  t the time, we acquired a true turnaround business.  The business was a manufacturer and erector of broadcast and communications towers.  We named the company Atlas Tower Corporation and in less than a year, increased business by 700% and increased profitability to 20%,

    Once on its new profitable path, our interests turned to what else could we use these giant towers for.  Their only use to date had been to place radio and TV transmitters at the very top, and that was it.  So we thought about other potential uses.  Of course, any potential use had to be governed by the most important factor when dealing with towers. . . the prevailing winds.  It was here we learned to understand the prevailing winds and gusts that would affect anything placed on the tower.

    Then it hit us.  What could we use the wind for, that’s always there trying to knock our tower down?  Wind turbines!  The immediate problem being that all wind turbines at that time were pretty much the same as the ones used today.  A giant propeller blade at the top turning a generator and making electricity.  The only real improvement since those early days was placing the generator up at the top with the blades instead of on the ground.  Actually, we don’t view this as an improvement.

    Well, we came up with a pretty novel approach, but once we ran some numbers, we were faced with the same problem as all alternate forms of energy.  It was far more expensive to produce than very cheap oil.  Yes, we had the oil shocks of the 70s, but they didn’t last long and any price rise in oil was a political one. . . not a cost of production.  So as in so many of our InNovations, we shelved it.

    Fast-forward 30 years to $3 gasoline, oil-rich dictators, militant environmentalists, and a new President with an eye on changing the energy paradigm.  It seemed like perhaps the its time had come.  Anemoi would be taken to the next level.

Look ma, no blades!

    As the subtitle suggests, moving all the critical parts of a wind turbine up in the vicinity of the blades, resolves a number of difficult engineering problems.  But now that these giants monolith machines have grown so large with blades spanning the length of a football field, new problems replace the old ones in delivering electricity at a competitive cost.

    Enter Anemoi technology, 30 years old and still way ahead of its time.  In fact, the only moving parts located up where the prevailing winds are, is the scoop assembly you see over here on the right.  The assembly sits on a bearing that permits the air intake horn to spin 360º.  The oversized vertical blade forces the air intake to face into the prevailing wind, no matter what direction it’s coming from.

    Einstein taught us that the simpler, the better.  InAmerica listened.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how it works.  The air is going to be forced into air intake and then pushed down the inside cylinder, by the air behind it.  The air is cool which means that the air isn’t fighting to turn around and try to go back up the inside cylinder.

    When it reaches the bottom of the tower, a venturi compresses the air into a small area, making the air speed up.  The venturi turbine spins because of the rushing wind which, connected through a sort of gearbox, turns a generator and produces electricity.  Generators get hot, but we pass the air exiting the venturi over the generator, bathing it and cooling it down.  Then due to the rounded bottom, the air is ducted to the outside cylinder, which forces the air, now heated by the generator, up the outside cylinder.  Solar energy heats the outside cylinder speeding up the air trying to rush out the top causing sort of a vacuum behind it.  This in turn compliments the pushing air behind it.  The air exits back into the atmosphere and you’re able to watch Monday night football.

    Preliminary studies suggest that a residential backyard version can pay for itself in 24 months, by channeling free electricity into the grid that requires public utilities to purchase the power.

    Currently, InAmerica is looking for a potential licensee of the technology, as it looks for a potential manufacturing acquisition that will benefit from this leading edge technology. 


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