THE WIND MAN
Revolutionizing the Power Grid One Building at a Time

OSU mechanical engineering professor Stel Walker has been interested in wind since he was a young boy wandering the beaches near his hometown of Reedsport on the notoriously windy Oregon coast.

After coming to Corvallis to study wind energy in the 1970s when OSU was one of only two universities in the U.S. doing wind energy research, one of Walker’s goals was to expand wind energy generation in urban settings.

He recently helped design a product that will do just that. It’s a new “micro” wind turbine that can be mounted in rows along the edges of building rooftops.

A leading design consultant to the wind energy industry, Walker worked with California- based AeroVironment, Inc. to design and manufacture the new turbine (see inset), which generates what the company calls “architectural wind.” The small-scale turbine design could revolutionize the industry, enabling power generation from wind in urban and suburban settings instead of only from rural wind farms of towering turbines.

“There are only a few wind turbine manufacturers in the U.S., and they’ve been telling city planners, architects, and building owners for years that they haven’t designed their wind turbines to be placed on buildings,” says AeroVironment’s Tom Zambrano. “But no one understands wind resources better than OSU, and Stel Walker says the wind in the Pacific Northwest doesn’t stop at city lines.”

Walker helped the company envision a small, quiet, and architecturally pleasing wind turbine that can be attached to a track along the perimeter of a roofline, similar to the way track lighting is attached. The number of turbines on the track can vary, depending on power needs and the size of the building.

As a graduate student at OSU, Walker helped pioneer wind energy research by creatingcomputerized aerodynamic performance design analyses of wind turbines and maintaining what has become the foremost wind database in the nation. He is currently director of the university’s Energy Resources Research Laboratory, and part of the Energy Systems Research Cluster.

Zambrano and other scientists involved in the industry since the beginning view OSU’s research as critical to the current worldwide acceptance of wind energy. Wind and other forms of alternative energy production are an integral part of “green” building design, which Walker and the College are committed to supporting.

These days, when wandering Oregon’s blustery beaches, Walker is pleased that his childhood fascination with wind has taken him to a place where innovation is leading to prosperity – in this case, clean electricity harvested from the winds blowing in off the Pacific.