Alan Arthur Wells

Alan Arthur Wells was a British structural engineer, born on 1 May 1924 and died on 8 November 2005, who worked at Queen's University Belfast and received the honorary degree of Doctor of Science from that university in 1986. In the late 1970s he developed the Wells turbine, an air turbine that keeps spinning in the same direction whatever the direction of the airflow, for use in oscillating water column wave power plants where a rising and falling water surface in an air compression chamber produces an oscillating air current. The efficiency of the Wells turbine in oscillating flow reaches values between 0.4 and 0.7.