TESNIC wind turbine @ CANWEA

Neat design. Tesla would be proud.

pricing?availability?

At 3 dollar / watt installed I'd go for it.

Wouldn't it be better to have the turning blades around the outer edge to give the wind more mechanical advantage? I agree with what was said about the blade design. It is very good.

The typical approach, he? Cost per watts and profitability in so many years crap. Just make the turbine, calculate a healy margin and sell the damn thing tomorrow. Do not listen to the marketing experts and keep it simple.

The disks inside will get dirty very quickly. Dust particles will get there and eventually stick to the surface area of the disks. The surface erosion will destroy any coatings on the disks and accelerate the dust build up. Then the optimial gap between the disks will get smaller and the effectivity of the turbine will drop, of course. The disks are a nice idea, but will not work in real life situations.

Real life situation will prove the viability of the concept.

Interesting. What about mounting horizontally. That way you could build an augmenter along the bottom half of the turbine to both force the air up and through the turbine and shielding the turbine from having to work against itself as the turbine is spinning toward the wind. Also, what about using rare earth magnets on the augmenter and making the turbine blades out of copper wire to turn the turbine into a generator as well?

I like this idea... why not take it a step further and design this to be built into a vehicle? Scoop the air along the sides of the vehicle, channel it through a filter and through this type of turbine to recharge/supplement the battery of an electric vehicle.

That ends up being perpetual motion, in other words the energy used to spin the generator is provided by the forward motion of the vehicle and therefore from the drive system.