I passed Olin's email on to a friend who is interested in the 
alternative energy field and he had some somewhat surprising 
comments - copied below.

Clever as it undoubtedly is, I'm not surprised that people have 
thought of this or similar before - I am constantly thinking up things 
and almost as often finding that someone has thought of them already. 
I keep a file of all such ideas. One of these days ... .

What is more surprising is the comment on efficiency. Also, I'm not 
sure how important this is even if true. It's usually not absolute 
efficiency that counts but power provided per $ in a given situation. 
There are some situations where enrgy available is limited and 
efficiency counts but this is not usual, expecially on smaller or one 
off system. ie if you have a windfarm on 100 acres then there will be 
a maximym number of windmills you can fit and best utilisation of 
available land and wind may well be important. If you want to make a 
steady 1 kW for your backwoods hideaway then the cost of doing this is 
liable to matter more than does how much wind you need to utilise to 
do it.

        RM

____________

Ken says:



Russell,

This is a very old idea.  I saw a model one at least 15 years ago
demonstarted at the "inventors corner" which used to be (and may still 
be)
part of the Easter Show.


Ross's cousin Duncan will tell you that it essentially operates on the
principle of drag rather than lift (as do vane/propellor type turbines
including the Darius rotor VWT).  As such it will have abysmal 
performance
by comparison  - think of trying to build an aircraft where vertical 
forces
are created by flat inclined surfaces rather than an airfoil.

Moving the orientation of the vanes helps but not enough to compete 
with an
airfoil-based design.

Regards,

Ken Mardle

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