Vortex Bladeless wind energy project team receives Altair CAE suite donation

Altair is supporting the Vortex Bladeless, a Wind Energy Spanish Crowd Funding Project by providing free software licenses, training, and engineering services. Vortex Bladeless was founded in 2013 as an R&D company, exclusively dedicated to the development and marketing of Vortex, a multi-patented bladeless electric wind generator. The project focuses on the development of generators able to capture the kinetic wind energy by ‘vortex shedding’ and transform it into electricity. This new technology seeks to overcome issues related to traditional wind turbines such as maintenance, amortization, noise, environmental impact, logistics, and visual aspects. Currently, the company’s focus is on the development of small wind products, with mass power generation devices planned for the future.

The Vortex engineers have started to implement Altair’s finite element analysis (FEA) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solutions for two-way Fluid Structure Interaction (2W-FSI) simulations in their development process, and have already benefited from Altair’s expertise via training and support sessions. In particular, the use of AcuSolve, HyperWorks Virtual Wind Tunnel, and OptiStruct has helped engineers to move towards a simulation driven design approach, leading to reduced development time and cost.

“We are grateful for Altair’s support of our project,” said David Yañez, Co-Ceo Technology at VORTEX. “Without simulation our product would be developed at a much slower rate and it would cost a lot more, because we would need many more prototypes. We feel very confident that Altair’s solutions suit our needs. This applies not only for the software capabilities but also for the highly valued support Altair brings to this partnership. Since the virtual demonstration of the product is one of our milestones, we truly believe that Altair’s contribution has a great impact on our day-to-day work.”

The collaboration started with a technical project to simulate the aerodynamic behavior of the device. For this the Altair ProductDesign engineers performed a fluid-structure interaction study with AcuSolve and OptiStruct. Thanks to the CAE model of this first project, the engineers were able to predict the movement of the vortex bladeless device with different wind intensities.

With the final Vortex Bladeless product the engineers expect to reduce manufacturing costs by 53%, operating costs by 51%, and maintenance costs by as much as 80% compared to traditional wind turbines.

“We are proud to take part in such an innovative project and happy to support it with licenses, training, and services,” said Stefano Deiana, country manager of Altair Spain. “The wind energy sector is a very important, growing market and current solutions have known obstacles, especially regarding maintenance issues, noise, and the environmental impact. Those could be solved with a product like the Vortex Bladeless.”