Innovation awards profile: Airsynergy - new approach to wind energy technology

When an organisation with the reputation of NASA says something can't be done the world tends to listen. And this was the case with wind energy until Irishman John Smyth took his expertise from the indoor air management sector and applied it with quite startling results to wind turbines.

Smyth founded Longford-based Airsynergy with his brothers and Adrian Kelly in 2008 to develop the new technology which allows wind turbines to double their energy output for just a 20 per cent increase in cost.

The innovative feature is a pressure control shroud that surrounds the turbine and controls the air in front of it increasing wind velocity across the rotor, thereby increasing power output.

This approach is markedly different to current wind turbines which rely on rotor blade size as the primary driver of performance.

“John approached me back in 2008 with a view to getting intellectual property protection for his ideas,” says Airsynergy co-founder Adrian Kelly.

“And when we did a patent search we saw that there was nothing in the world like it. Jim brought a knowledge of air impulsion systems that the wind energy industry didn’t have.

“The principles he was working on were alien to the industry. NASA had produced a report in the 1980s saying that this type of system couldn’t work so the industry just concentrated on building higher towers and making turbines with larger blades to address the efficiency issue.”

The Airsynergy innovation possesses a number of advantages. These include the ability to produce electricity at quite low wind speeds, tower heights 60 per cent lower than the current norm, and double the output of traditional turbines of the same size.

"This means that wind energy will now be viable in countries and regions with quite low wind speeds like Germany, " Kelly points out.

“Once we protected the innovation we started working on its development and producing prototypes,” says Kelly. “We installed our first working prototype in 2010 and this proved the technology works.”

Development work has been continuing since then and the company has had considerable interest in licensing the technology from companies in the US and the Caribbean as well as in the UK, Scandinavia and Japan.

“We are a small company and we initially toyed with the idea of manufacturing but our business is innovation and inventing so we decided to licence the technology to partners in key markets and they will manufacture and distribute the products.

“We currently have a number of products in development based on our patented pressure control shroud technology,” he continues.

“In 2014 Airsynergy’s product range will include a 3kw, 5kw and 20kw turbine products as well as a Streetlight turbine which has a huge potential market, particularly in the US. Once this phase is complete we will look to develop larger units starting with a 50kW and moving on to the development of 150kW and 450kW wind turbines.

“We are also developing a mechanical enhancement unit to improve the operations of air conditioning and chiller systems.”