Industrial designer Anthony Reale’s ‘strait power‘ provides a highly efficient redesign of water-powered turbine generators.
It was in observing the activity and appearance of the basking shark that reale gained insight into his model’s structure.
The shark spends 18 hours a day with its mouth open, sifting for food, and the movement of the water into its mouth and out its gills aids in its swimming.
Reale recognized that ‘fluid movement is more than just using the energy flowing through you but the energy flowing around you to aid in your task.’ He determined morespecifically that, as with airplane wings, a pressure differential exists along the shark’s body: water moves at higher pressure along the straight bottom, while the increased distance it must travel over the curved top means that it is at lower pressure.
Anthony Reale progressed quickly into building a prototype of the device.
The team calculated that the prototype already improves power output of a single turbine blade by 40%, a figure reale expects to improve in later versions.
via designboom
Leave A Comment