The reason these turbines turn in a very slight wind is because they are eight bladed and each blade appears in the photo to have a very high (45 degree) pitch.  This is a high starting torque design but INHERENTLY VERY INEFFICIENT.   This design  is similar to the multi-bladed old western farm water pumping windmills  which needed a high starting torque to break the inertia in the mechanical system and get the water pump off dead center and moving .   The improvement with these plastic turbines over the very inefficient western style wind mills is that the plastic turbines are ducted – surrounded by a plastic circular shroud which improves their efficiency by confining the wind flow as discussed  in my comment to Bill MacDermott's post about Binary Building Turbines on Realneo here.

The rule in wind turbines is that the fewest number of blades allows the highest blade tip speed which equals the highest efficiency of energy extraction.  Therefore, this plastic design is way over on the least efficient end of the design spectrum.

The problem with a low number of blades (theoretically a counterweighted one bladed turbine is most efficient) is that the magnetic field in the generator “locks” the turbine rotor from starting to rotate in a slight wind.  Because the multiple field magnets and multiple armature segments demonstrate an uneven resistance to rotation called “cogging”,  the wind turbine rotor gets “caught” magnetically and requires a strong wind to break out of the magnetic “cog” and get rotating .  Once rotating, the turbine blades will continue to rotate if the wind slows down, but once stopped has to have the wind go up high to again break out of the cog. Variable pitch blades help reduce this problem (but are complex and expensive).

That the small plastic turbines will be mass produced cheaply is great, but they  could be much more efficient at the same low cost if the generator is designed with as few magnetic “cogs” as possible (more complexity) and if sophisticated electronics (including starting capacitors) are used to vary the magnetic flux (or vary the air gap)  in the generator with variations in wind speed.

Rather than spending Cuyahoga taxpayers money on the dream of “about 10” huge wind turbines in Lake Erie, the Cuyahoga County energy “task force” should fund  research and manufacturing of this type of “massively parallel processing” small wind turbines. Think of these small turbines as energy converters just as leaves on trees are photo energy converters.  Nature doesn’t put one giant leaf on a tree, but massive parallel processors – many leaves. Got a better idea than Nature?  Tell us about it…

Hi there

I saw on my website that there was some traffic from this blog so i went to check who was so nice to help us spreading the news.i want to thank Norm and also Suzan for her welcome message.

I have registered in order to answer to Jeff Buster's worries.

Jeff ,We do not have all the problems that you have mentionned,so i think that you    have  posted an answer before checking what is Motorwind technology.

This is what is interresting about internet,nothing escapes from scrutiny.

I have released Motorwind just 6 weeks ago right after having finished the last tests

in a wind tunnel at the local University and since then i came to realize what we really

did. We have created a 1 billion people market overnight .

All those who cant afford anything else ,all those who could not use anything else,all those who did not dare using anything else.

during these 5 weeks I have to create a multi national corporation doing manufacturing ,distribution,installation etc etc  starting from ZERO and with very limited ressources.

my main focus is to make Motorwind available to those who are in real need.

India-south America-Africa-remote China-thousands of islands anywhere.

The succes we are having is what makes human being still having hopes.

Very tiny companies can solve problems that the giant ones keep denying:pollution.

best regards

Lucien Gambarota