Catch all the wind on the side of the building and lead it to your generator ([edited] with turbine inside pipe).

Perhaps some external energy would be needed to be put in, so that the wind blow would be directed to this location.
-- pashute, Mar 25 2010

green skyscrapers http://www.altdoten...en-skyscraperspers/
At least the last two appear to employ this concept. [moomintroll, Mar 26 2010]

Dr. Rashidi's (water tower adjacent) Bernoulli wind capture devices http://www.csuohio....rent%20Projects.pdf
Probably what [auto] meant. Dunno... [pashute, Aug 23 2011]

Roof Ridge Windmill Roof_20Ridge_20Windmill
Could be turned sideways to work on building corners [marklar, Aug 24 2011]

Well, yes ish. Clearly, if you have a large flat wall and the wind is hitting it obliquely, it will tend to direct the wind toward one side, where you could site a turbine. Or a slopey-sided building could direct ground-level wind upward to a rooftop generator. But it doesn't sound very promising to me.

Perhaps an alternative would be to adapt high-rise buildings to funnel wind. Imagine a cube (this cube being the top 10 stories of a big building). Now imagine making the four walls of the cube convex (ie, pinched-in), so as to present a square funnel to wind coming from every direction. Then put some kind of turbinical thing in the middle. Maybe.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Mar 25 2010


It seems unnecessarily dangerous to put 100-foot spinning propellers in the middle of a city.
-- Cuit_au_Four, Mar 25 2010


// unnecessarily dangerous //

That's got to be worth a bun, then.
-- 8th of 7, Mar 25 2010


How about mounting the whole building on a turntable, and profiling the sides so one half of each side is concave and the other convex? Then the building itself would spin.
-- pocmloc, Mar 26 2010


I don't have a link handy but this is being somewhat baked already. There was one recently in the paper, a CSU project where 4 small turbines on the side of a water tower were using the tower itself to funnel the air into the fans, allowing them to be much smaller. There are also some rooftop style ones, using the broad side of the sloped roof as a ramp for the air to blast into the turbines. These areas are higher pressure and higher speed, so small turbines do well.
-- AutoMcDonough, Mar 26 2010


Something like auto mcdonogh said was what I meant. The wind goes into a pipe and is lead to one point where the turbines are located (internally), and then up a chimney and out above the roof.

Improvement: Gather wind on roof toward pipe exit, and create a vacuum Bernoulli effect making the pressure diff on the turbine even greater.

No moving parts, real easy and probably low cost to make. Call for Do It Yourselfers or handypeople! Wanna try?
-- pashute, Aug 23 2011


I already gave you a [+] oc(Oo.

This wind capture idea leads into a single pipe. Like a wind tower. Your idea is more of putting the centrifugal turbine along the edge.
-- pashute, Aug 24 2011


In addition to generating power, could it also play subsonic pan-pipes?
-- mouseposture, Aug 25 2011



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