Abstract
The Windbelt technology was originally conceived in 2004, during a trip to Petite Anse, Haiti. This fishing village near the coast was not connected to an electrical grid, and the only lighting available was diesel-powered or kerosene-based.
Shawn Frayne, a member of a team from MIT and Petite Anse working in the area, recognized that instead of kerosene lamps, white LEDs powered by a very inexpensive wind generator might be able to better light homes and schools in the area. However, when Shawn tried to design this affordable, turbine-based wind generator, he hit a brick wall: turbine technology is too inefficient at these scales to be a viable option.
However, these difficult constraints of cost and local manufacture led to a new invention, the world’s first turbine-less wind generator.
The Windbelt generator fulfilled its original design criteria while demonstrating10x the efficiency of the state-of-the-art in micro-turbine technology on these scales. Now, Humdinger is poised to take this technology and apply it to a wide array of fields, from rural lighting to energy harvesting for wireless sensors in ‘smart buildings’...
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