What's New in the Windfair World - AirEnergy3D: A 3D printed, opensource, mobile wind turbine

For anyone aspiring to become a self-sufficient hermit, living off the grid and generating free and own energy? Well they can stop drying out and burning their number-twos because here comes AirEnergy 3D.

3D printers are a technology with tons of potential applications, they just have to dreamt up. Polish 3D printer manufacturer Omni3D decided to dream big with its wind power project. The team hopes to create an easily portable wind turbine that can pump out up to 300 watts of energy. Not enough power to keep a home running, but more than enough to power laptops, smartphones, and other gadgets.

Although the project could be discarded as another pie-in-the-sky alternative energy solution that will never come to pass, this Polish crowdfunding project is a compact, portable, and upgradable wind turbine that consists of blades and a base station. The platform was designed to be modifiable and open source. You can even add new turbine blades by printing them on your standard 3D printer. Open source meaning that would-be users can tinker with designs to best suit their needs.

“From the very beginning the most important thing for us as 3D printers producer was educating people about the incredible potential of the technology. That’s why we always have special projects running inside Omni3D. We’ve printed prosthetic beak for a penguin that lost it in a fight, we are organizing free and open meetings where we explain the technology to young and old etc. This time the idea was to print something that can deliver more value than the printer itself. Another reason was the need for fully open source solutions in the renewable energy market,” said Konrad Sierzputowski, co-founder of Omni3D.

In ideal conditions the turbine can generate and store 300W of power. This means a phone, laptop can be plugged in or stick the generator into a wall socket and send electricity back onto the grid. While it is doubtful that many of us would set up a wind turbine in our backyard, this could be a nice, portable system for off-the-grid generation.

Will this  this product be mass-produced? Sierzputowski isn’t sure: he’s just trying to give something cool back to the 3D printing community” he said. “All You need…is wind.” In a nutshell AirEnergy3D is clean and renewable energy that saves you money and saves the enviroment!

Omni3D mentions on its Kickstarter page that they've successfully developed a working prototype, but they need crowdfunding cash to make the designs scalable, easy to assemble, and easy to ship. An early bird starter kit will set you back almost $500 (and even more to ship outside the UK). However, the team hopes to make future production models cost around $350.

Despite its relatively cheap price, compared to other wind energy methods, seeing lots of AE3D turbines strapped to roofs or sitting on patios is an unlikely scenario, but the goal to create a 3D-printed project that has potentially more value than the sum of its parts—with that one, they might be on to something.

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