via inhabitat:
A new wind technology using wind belts rather than rotating turbines promises exciting prospects for aesthetic installations. I could see the adaptation of this idea for a LAGI installation. Modules of Humdinger energy producing armatures as the medium for a new public art and sculptural form!
Instead of using conventional geared, rotating airfoils to pull energy from the wind, the Windbelt(tm) relies on an aerodynamic phenomenon known as aeroelastic flutter (‘flutter’). While the the phenomenon is a well-known destructive force (e.g. a cause of bridge failure), researchers at Humdinger have discovered that it can also be a useful and powerful mechanism for catching the wind at scales and costs beyond the reach of turbines.
July 2018 Update:
It seems that the website for Humdinger Wind has gone dark, which is not a good sign for the viability of the technology. Still you can read up on the idea in some past online articles: physics.org, and wattnow.org. It seems that the inventor has moved on to other things and that the technology is unlikely to find real world applications beyond prototypes on instructables.com and others who have sought to replicate the idea, such as this group from Humboldt State University, the keepers of the windbelt.eu website, and of course the many LAGI design competition proposals that have incorporated Windbelt into their designs. We’ll keep checking and update this post should anything change.
Here is the Wikipedia entry on the invention: Windbelt.
