Using the power and properties of water to turn it into energy is nothing new: just look at hydroelectric dams and even further back in time… water mills! An engineer has nevertheless found a new method to exploit water with a minimum of environmental impact.
Generating energy in small rivers or even streams is not possible with traditional techniques. However, this is enough for Miroslav Sedláček and his turbine to generate electricity! He came up with this idea by observing the way the leaves turn on themselves in the opposite direction, when they are at the edge of the whirlpool forming during the flow of water.
A turbine capable of supplying five households
All of this has led to complex work to understand how water generates this effect. The engineer and his team from the Technical University of Prague have not found all the solutions. On the other hand, the hydrodynamic principle brought to light effectively makes it possible to transform the energy deployed by the water into electrical energy. And you don’t have to be next to a huge waterfall to generate this electricity, even weak streams of water can be enough to power five homes.
The hydroelectric turbine imagined by Miroslav Sedláček fits in a box no bigger than a microwave oven. It contains a rotor placed in a well (the strator), designed in such a way to exploit the movements of the water via a complex game of rotation.
The miniturbine called SETUR Bladeless Turbine was born in 1996, and it has been on the market since 2015. Of course, improvements are regularly made to it and patents are filed to protect the invention. It is possible to buy the 500 W model from €2,500, a version capable of pulsing 5 kW is available from €20,000.
