There is no point to remind you of the fact that fossil fuels are harming our planet and we need new and efficient ways to produce clean energy. A great way to generate energy is to use the force of the wind, but conventional wind turbines are big and expensive, without mentioning that wind farms are the same - the size of small cities and the costs are huge.
Everything is too big therefore Doug Selsam decided to think small and came up with the Sky Serpant which is based on small rotors that use the wind power to generate energy. He says that “the wind-turbine design out there right now is a thousand years old” and his multi-rotor approach is much better.
He started his work back in the ’80s because he read in a textbook, while he was a student at the University of California at Irvine, that “this single-rotor turbine design is the most power you can get” and he didn’t agree because “more rotors equals more power”. Probably because he didn’t like what he read, he never graduate from Irvine and he started to develop designs for wind power systems and by 1999 he dedicated his only for these wind designs.
In 2003, his efforts were rewarded and he was granted $75,000 from the California Energy Commission and he was assigned to design a 3,000-watt turbine. He completed his work and so far, he sold 20 dual-rotor turbines that produce 2,000 watts. All of these wind power system were developed in the garage of his home.
Doug Selsam’s idea was appreciated by Brent Scheibel, a former turbine tester for General Electric, who said that “the laws of physics take most of them out of the equation very early. Doug’s idea is one of the very, very few that I’ve seen that actually has a strong chance of making strides into the commercial world”. Selsam appreciates these words but he says that he can “make turbines using this technique that are way more powerful than anything in GE’s wildest imagination”. It remains to see if he can really do this. Hopefully, he will.
May 26th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Seems very cool looking, and looks promising. Still, I can’t help thinking that it would be dangerous in practice, e.g. someone’s head is chopped off by a whipping chain of propellers, but I’m sure they have some way around that.
May 26th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Is there any particular reason he calls it a “serpant” instead of “serpent”? Was the prototype made out of pants, perhaps?
May 26th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Serpant indeed.
May 26th, 2008 at 10:58 pm
um yeah i think that:
1) they are made out of pants and
2) they are probably 100ft in the air
kinda get around the head chopping off thing … but yeah still is a good idea
May 26th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
@Nick - perhaps you could put it quite high up?
May 27th, 2008 at 3:59 am
When the wind drops, does it flop gently to the ground? Is it scalable, e.g., downsize it into a lawnmower?
May 27th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
My I have your Website and e-mail? I am very interested in this product and have
some new idea to share with you.
May 28th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
This looks like photo-shop.
June 3rd, 2008 at 12:10 pm
hi
if this cossept is real i would like to buy and implement it in my country for power generation.
plz let me know whome to contact to get the full details.
June 7th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
photoshopped!
June 7th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
great idea! can we have some better pictures?
June 7th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
i forgot and “r” in my name lol
June 7th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
This is photoshop - so what? The prototypes are actually using a rigid driveshaft, and are only about 10 or 20 feet long.
June 11th, 2008 at 3:09 am
This guy had to really ask the question (maybe to his professor?) why it was written in the textbook that a single rotor is the most efficient way. Multiple rotors close together are inefficient, as
the wind’s air flow is quite distorted by the propeller and each next turbine in a chain will get “shadowed” by the previous one up stream. While this might not be a big concern on a small scale turbines, it definitely is for large commercial turbines, which really should get the most efficiency out of a single rotor. In the end, instead of two smaller ones you can make one big propeller:))
June 13th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
3,000 watts??? You’ve got to be kidding, or maybe it is a typo, or maybe you don’t understand how electricity works. Seriously, 3,000 watts is not a lot of power. My car (well, SUV…Chevy Trailblazer) alternator produces around 2,070 watts of electricity (13.8 volts X 150 amps=2,070 watts…yes the equation is correct…Ohm’s Law…look it up). I think you mean 3,000 Kilowatts or 3,000,000 watts.
July 5th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Actually 3000 watts would be quite a lot for a wind turbine this size. There exists turbines that produce up to 5 MW (5000 kW or about 1/100 of a small nuclear reactor), but these are *huge*..