History of Wind Energy- overview - I

vHistory of WIND Energy - Overview- I

                                        As we know wind energy is one of the oldest clean green energy. In this Chapter we are going to take a look on important events in the wind energy history from when the humans were started to use wind. It has been used by the ancient peoples from 2000B.C. Even the ancient Egyptians were used wind energy to propel their sailboats.

v A Frieze at Egypt

                                                   The above picture is a Frieze of the temple of Edfu, in the river bank of Nile, Egypt. Also we could heard about the Chinese navy force had been used kites to signal their troop on battle. And there are lots of evidence for the peoples were used wind energy to power their carts (called as wind carts).

                                                 In and around 700B.C the people were living in Sri Lanka used wind energy to powering their furnace. The furnaces used to separate the metals from its ore. Archeologists believe the furnaces enabled Sri Lankans to make weapons and tools. These furnaces would construct as dig large crescent- shaped in top of steep mountains. In summer monsoon wind blows into the furnaces to create small tornados caused to increase temperature about 1200 deg C.

v Archeologists found  Iron smelting furnaces where used WIND in Sri Lanka

Prema

                                                The first wind mills were developed by Persians (present Iran) on 750A.D. This wind mills looks like our modern design. These machines were used to grind grains and pump water. Also the Europeans were started to build wind mills around 1200A.D. In the same period the Genghis khan’s Mongolian army captured the Persian wind mill builders and bring them to China to build wind mills for water supply for dry land.  In Egypt wind mills were developed to build grind sugar canes. And the Europeans build first post mill out of wood.

                                      In 1300s A.D the Dutch invented the eight sided wooden tower smock mill. The top of mill roof (Nacelle) rotates to keep sails into the right wind (yawing).

v A Smock Mill

                                                         

                                                   Wind Mills were developed in Spain, Greece, southern Europe & France on 1600A.D. In the same period settlers from Europe were started to build wind mills in North America. In the beginning of 1700s Netherlands and England have build up over 10,000 units of wind mills. In 1895 Daniel Halladay builds and wind turbines. This is first wind mills specially designed for west. It consists of thin wooden blades and the system turns itself into wind.

                                                     In 1888 wind energy history reached a great mile stone. Of Course, The first wind Turbine invented by a richest inventor Charles F. Brush from cleave land, U.S which is used to generate electricity. The wind turbine had generates electricity for 350 lights in his Manson. And in the basement stores 408 battery cells – glass jars filled with chemical used to store the electrical energy produced from the wind turbine. Later his Brush Electric Co. has taken over by General Electric Co.  And during the couple of decades wind mills had been developed with steel blades instead of wooden blades thus the efficiency was improved. There were six millions of wind mills installed in America by the settlers from western. These were used to grind grains and water pumping to dry land, steam locomotives and drain water from lands below sea level.

v The first WIND Electric Generator Invented by Charles F. Brush

                                                                In 1892 Poul Lacour from Denmark invented a Dutch style wind turbine with large wooden blades to produce electric energy. His turbines were with few blades and fast rotating. This output was much high when compared with slowly rotating many blade rotors. In 1908, about 72 wind turbines were spring up in Denmark to produce low cost electricity to farms villages.

                                                               About 1900 U.S weather service department sent kites up to record the weather parameters like wind speed, humidity, temp… etc. in the same period Wright Brothers (Wibur & Orvilli Wright) designed and fly a giant box kite. This success of this experiment was led them to invent a first successful airplane in 1903.

v Wright Brothers Invention

                                               In 1920s An Inventor from French GJM Darrieus designed the first vertical axix wind turbine. Engineer Palmer Putman and his team of experts designed a cheapest and large scale wind turbine. This first large scale wind turbine begins its production in America on 1941. In 1941 smith-Putman large scale wind turbine was installed at Grandpa’s Knob, it’s a hill top of Rutland, U.K. It has about 250 Tones of weight and a wide rotor diameter of 52.5Meters. It was supplied electricity to the local community for 18months units its bearing failure. The machine was shut down in 1943.

v Smith- Putman designed Large scale wind Turbine Rutland, U.K

                               After the end of Second World War (1945) the engineers were decided to restart the wind turbine even its blades have cracked. Three weeks later one of its blades got broken off and flew away from the turbine. Then Putman & team abundant the wind turbine and gave up his wind experiment due to lack of money.

The WIND will Blew…..