Harnessing the Energy of Galloping Gertie 39
FatLittleMonkey writes "You've all seen the footage of Galloping Gertie, the infamous Tacoma Narrows bridge. This is due to a type of turbulence called Wake Galloping, caused by airflow creating lift on the lee-side of cylinders (or cables on suspension bridges.) Now researchers in South Korea have developed a way of harnessing the turbulence to generate electricity. Their device works most efficiently at wind speeds too low for conventional wind turbines."
Re:Catastrophic failure? (Score:4, Insightful)
What makes you think this design would be completely uncontrolled and just let nature have its way rather than say put guide-vanes in critical places to control the reaction to the turbulence? People don't design this stuff without taking such basics into consideration.
Conventional wind turbines do this too, they rotate off axis to the wind and then lock the blades. Heck nearly every type of energy generator be it a steam turbine, natural gas, diesel generator etc have some kind of high input speed / high output power trip.