Sandia pitch competition yields idea to commercialize wind energy
An idea to commercialize wind energy for retailers won the top prize in a competition sponsored by Sandia National Laboratories’ for scientists to pitch their most innovative energy-related ideas.
Now, the winning team from Sandia will compete in the National Lab Accelerator Pitch Event on Nov. 29 in San Francisco. Teams from 11 national laboratories will compete for up to $50,000 to bring their ideas to life.
The Sandia pitch competition featured six teams, pitching their ideas, which included concepts involving heat exchangers, better fuel efficiency, new software, an app tracking system, and reducing drag on cars and flying vehicles. The winning concept came from a team working on distributed wind energy.
The winning team, led by Brent Houchens, a mechanical engineer in Sandia’s thermal fluids science and engineering group, came up with an idea called Aero-MINEs, which stands for Motionless, INtegrated, Energy. Houchens described it as “wind energy harvesters that have no external moving parts, are safe, reliable, quiet and totally scalable.”
If they win the national competition, Houchens’ team would manufacture a prototype stand for a model they could test in a wind tunnel. The initial version of Aero-MINEs would be about 10 feet tall and 3 feet wide, but other sizes would be available. Aero-MINEs power generation is isolated internally by the transmission of air, then amplified by outlet jet nozzles.
“We’ve done initial computational fluid dynamic simulations to show that we can generate a significant pressure decrease to draw the suction that we need to drive the generator,” Houchens said at the Sandia event.
The market for this system is strong as retailers including Amazon.com, Walmart, and Facebook are committed to using more renewable energy.
The goal is to commercialize in the next two years, Houchens stated.
The goal of the competition was to not only innovate but to help Sandia form relationships with members of the business community, Jackie Kerby Moore, Sandia’s manager of Technology and Economic Development, said.
“We want to invigorate the entrepreneur culture at Sandia, inspire our entrepreneurs and increase the number of Sandia entrepreneurs leaving the labs to start up or expand companies,” Moore said.
