Shawn Frayne

Shawn Frayne is the inventor of the Windbelt, a wind power harvesting device he invented in 2004 to convert wind to electricity. Instead of a rotating turbine it uses a flexible polymer ribbon stretched between supports across the wind, with magnets glued to the ribbon. When the wind blows across it the ribbon vibrates through vortex shedding, like the string of an aeolian harp, and the moving magnets induce current in nearby pickup coils by electromagnetic induction. He won the 2007 Breakthrough Award from the publishers of Popular Mechanics and has worked to make the device cheaper, although tests have refuted his claim that it is ten to thirty times more efficient than small wind turbines.