Shawn Frayne, 26, is the Windbelt’s inventor that became recipient of the 2007 Breakthrough Award from the publishers of the magazine, Popular Mechanics.
Shawn, 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 get 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. Nevertheless, these difficult constraints of cost and local manufacture led to a new invention, the world’s first turbine-less wind generator.
Roll down as I take you to the roller coaster ride of Shawn’s exclusive interview, where he himself divulged the intricacies behind his cool invention,
1. First and the most rhetoric question is how and when did you come up with an idea like windbelt Micro-wind? Critics say that windbelt Micro-wind is a parody of Tacoma Narrows Bridge, is it?
Shawn: Well, I first saw the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse video in a middle-school physics class, and thought, “Boy, that’s a lot of energy. Maybe something like that could make electricity!” However, I made the same mis-step that I think a lot of other sciency-dreamer kids might have made, which is to imagine a field of piezoelectric grass that will wave as the wind blows across it. It’s a nice idea, but it doesn’t make the leap from imagination into a practical system. So, that was a bummer. But that whole experience planted this seed of curiosity in me about different ways of perhaps capturing the wind, so when I visited Haiti for the first time several years ago and started thinking about wind power again, those old ideas started to grow into this new thing, the Windbelt. It’s sort of coincidental I think that the phenomenon underlying the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse that first inspired me ten or twelve years ago was actually so closely related to the aerodynamic effect that the Windbelt actually ended up using.
2. I assume the band (windbelt Micro-wind) is only going to oscillate at a very specific air velocity flowing over/under it and when the air speed is not the right one for vibration to occur it won’t set up mechanical resonance and so the band won’t oscillate and produce energy, what do you have to say in this regard?
Shawn: That’s not actually true. (phew). This is one of the biggest misunderstandings about the Windbelt technology. The smallish prototypes that got some coverage recently will produce increasing levels of electrical power from between 4mph to around 14mph, without any adjustment to the belt tension. Above 14mph, the generators still work, but the power output levels off. In larger versions I’ve been experimenting with, that wind speed range is even greater again, all without any dynamic tensioning systems. The reason people find this so hard to believe is that there is a common thought that the Tacoma Narrows was oscillating because it was resonating with the wind. That’s not really correct. This effect of aeroelastic flutter, which tore apart that bridge and is a dominant effect for the Windbelt generators, is not the same thing as resonance — in other words, it’s not like the opera singer that has to sing a perfect note to shatter the glass. Aeroelastic flutter is much more forgiving when it comes to wind speeds. That said, resonance is indeed involved in the Windbelt systems, but not in the way that I think most folks think it is.
3. Does it require a few seconds of strong wind to get it running, then a constant supply?
Shawn: The current prototypes will start operating in very low speed wind, around 4 or 5 mph. They start operating in under a second. There’s not a lot of mass to move, so stuff gets going pretty quickly.
4. Is there any probability of unifying these wind belts into standard power and phone lines down the line?
Shawn: Maybe. There’s a lot we don’t yet know about this nascent technology. For now, our focus with Humdinger Wind Energy, LLC is on getting a clear understanding of the landscape that can be influenced by the Windbelt approach, across a variety of applications. (Did I do a good job of dodging that question?)
5. Shawn, please make our readers aware of the two technologies, in the fields of “green” packaging and water disinfection, from concepts into developed products in pre-production.
Shawn: The invention in the field of ‘green packaging’ is now owned by a large Fortune 500 company, so I can’t really comment too much on it (but I think your readers will like it when it hits the market) — it has to do with a self-inflating packaging material, that can be reused many times. But anyone interested in the solar water disinfection project can check out this video in which I describe the concept and the product (thanks to Catherine Laine of AIDG.org for the video).
6. What is innovation to you - design, technology or the creative processes itself?
Shawn: I think there’s a difference between invention and innovation. In my book, inventions are the key fundamental advances that lead to new industries. The phonograph was an invention, certainly, the radio, the slinky. Innovations are different, in that they are the many incremental, but hugely important, advances that help to refine an invention so that it can become a marketable product, increasing the efficiency of solar cells, for instance. And I think there are inventions and innovations in both design and technology, and those two fields mush into each other quite a lot.
7. What work are you seeing right now that’s blowing you away?
Shawn: In the leading-edge tech, I see the UV water treatment technologies pioneered by Dr. Ashok Gadgil. The cool stuff that One Laptop Per Child is doing (despite any reservations people might have about their particular objective and approach, their technology is pretty unbelievable).
Amy Smith’s Phase Change Incubator which enables extremely low-cost, no-electricity testing of water quality; Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipTwo; Jaipur Foot’s work on driving down the cost and production time of prosthetics in India (they use some ingenious technologies to create very functional artificial limbs that can be provided free-of-cost, in a day or two to amputees).
In new business models, International Development Enterprises has over the last 26 years forged the idea (against great initial criticism) that profit can fight poverty, and millions of farmers across the world have benefited as a result; and Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group is developing a new model of development in Guatemala that involves incubating local self-sustaining businesses that design, build, install, and maintain wind generators, biodigesters, and micro-hydro power plants around the country. And there’s a lot of other great stuff going on out there that is totally amazing, which is just really unknown on the blogs, but I think that’s changing….
8. Where do you see yourself, after, let’s say, five years from now?
Shawn: Somewhere warm, with a cup of coffee or maybe somewhere cold, with a cup of coffee!
9. Any words of wisdom, you’d like to give to our readers?
Shawn: Cubicles kill creativity. So, if you are reading this from a cubicle, I suggest quitting immediately, inventing a time machine, and going back a few years to tell yourself to quit sooner.
Thank you Shawn for sparing out time in doing an interview with us, it is greatly appreciated.
I’d also like to wish you luck for all your future endeavors 
source: ecofriend.org
