A new type of wind turbine has been developed that mimics the wing movements of a hummingbird.
It was designed by a company in Tunisia called Tyer Wind. The head of the company, Anis Aouini, has described the technology as "3-D Aouinian kinematics". Hummingbirds can hover and fly backwards. Aouini has described the hummingbird as the most efficient bird with unique kinematics and aerodynamics that have been mimicked into this new technology.
Biomimicry is to observe and replicate natural designs found in nature. This is what has been done here, where the hummingbird has been analyzed and the design and patterns that it employs have been mimicked and copied into a technology.
The team of designers analyzed and replicated the movements of the hummingbird, except they reversed the energy flow.
Instead of using energy to fly in the air, energy is captured from the wind and transferred into a spinning axle inside the turbine.
In mimicking the hummingbirds wing pattern movements, the sweeping motion tips form a figure 8 shape. This new wind converter has use this design to capture both the up strokes and down strokes which enables it to be easily scalable. The wings also generate less noise than current models, and might also be less hazardous to birds.
The design is still in its infancy, and it's still unclear how they would actually perform in a side-by-side test with conventional designs. Aouini claims there are other possibilities such as industrial use, and for car and motor boat engines and pumps.
The biomimitic converter's wings are made of carbon fiber and span 5.25ft each. The current design is capable of producing 1kW of power.
There is some technical data they provided, which is shown below:
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