Windbelt

The Windbelt is a wind power harvesting device invented by Shawn Frayne in 2004 for converting wind into electricity with no rotating blades. It consists of a flexible polymer ribbon stretched between two supports set across the wind direction, with small magnets attached to the ribbon; wind blowing across the ribbon makes it flutter through vortex shedding, the same vibrating action an aeolian harp produces, and the moving magnets induce current in nearby pickup coils by electromagnetic induction. Frayne conceived the idea in 2004 after visiting a village in Haiti with no electrical grid, aiming to build a device cheap enough, a few dollars in materials, to replace kerosene lamps in homes like the ones he had seen there, and an early prototype built for under ten dollars powered LEDs, a radio and a clock in turn using wind from a household fan. Frayne won a 2007 Breakthrough Award from Popular Mechanics for the invention and went on to found the companies Humdinger Wind Energy and Haddock Invention to keep developing it, but independent testing later found the device efficiency, between about 0.21 and 0.53 percent in one small prototype, well below the 1 to 10 percent efficiency typical of conventional small wind turbines, contradicting the inventor own claims that it was far more efficient than they are.