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2007-10-10, 22:29:00 How can you capture the wind's energy in the simplest way possible? My friend Shawn Frayne invented a really cool device for generating electricity from wind power, and it netted him one of Popular Mechanics "Breakthough Awards." His company is called Humdinger, and the device is named the Windbelt, and together the two names give a pretty good sense of what it is. It's a strip of material that hums in the wind, vibrating quickly. (It's the same mechanism behind the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940, when wind made the suspension bridge pitch and roll so much it fell apart.) Shawn's device has magnets on one end, with coils of wire nearby, so the vibrating belt moves the magnets, and then produces an electric current in the coils. It's enough to power a small LED light, or a clock, or a radio, as he demonstrates in this video on the Popular Mechanics site. And here's a schematic of it, also from Popular Mechanics: 
Here's how Shawn describes how he thought it up (from the Humdinger site): The WindbeltTM technology was originally conceived in 2004, during a trip to Petite Anse, Haiti. This fishing village near the coast was not connected to an electrical grid, and the only lighting available was diesel-powered or kerosene-based. Shawn Frayne, a member of a team from MIT and Petite Anse working in the area, recognized that instead of kerosene lamps, white LEDs powered by a very inexpensive wind generator might be able to better light homes and schools in the area. However, when Shawn tried to design this affordable, turbine-based wind generator, he hit a brick wall: turbine technology is too inefficient at these scales to be a viable option. However, these difficult constraints of cost and local manufacture led to a new invention, the world’s first turbine-less wind generator. The WindbeltTM fulfilled its original design criteria while demonstrating10x the efficiency of the state-of-the-art in micro-turbine technology on these scales. Now, Humdinger is poised to take this technology and apply it to a wide array of fields, from rural lighting to energy harvesting for wireless sensors in ‘smart buildings’.
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