Altair has announced its support for the Vortex Bladeless project by providing free engineering services and training.
Vortex Bladeless was founded in 2013 as an R&D company, exclusively dedicated to the development and marketing of Vortex, a multi-patented bladeless electric wind generator. The project focuses on the development of generators able to capture the kinetic wind energy by ‘vortex shedding’ and transform it into electricity.
This new technology seeks to overcome issues related to traditional wind turbines such as maintenance, amortization, noise, environmental impact, logistics, and visual aspects. Currently, the company’s focus is on the development of small wind products, with mass power generation devices planned for the future.
The collaboration started with a technical project to simulate the aerodynamic behaviour of the device. For this the Altair engineers performed a fluid-structure interaction study. Following these new batch of tests engineers were able to predict the movement of the vortex bladeless device with different wind intensities.
With the final Vortex Bladeless product the engineers expect to reduce manufacturing costs by 53%, operating costs by 51%, and maintenance costs by as much as 80% compared to traditional wind turbines.