Wind. It is nature’s gift for humans, so we could harness it to generate electricity without suffocating her (and ourselves). But do you know, wind could also a source of power for cars too? And no, we are not talking about cars with sails. It is more like a windmill on wheels.
Folks, meet the Chinook ETS Wind Powered Car from a Montreal-based engineering team. Chinook ETS has windmill on its body which converts the motion of the wind into mechanical energy for powering the car. Therefore, it is not far off from being a car with sails.
Siméon Picard, one of the students involved in this green vehicle, liken the Chinook ETS as a bicycle with the windmill as the pedals. The Chinook you see here is the 9th iteration, boasting less aerodynamic losses, reduced mass, and change in economic for the driver. It has a carbon fiber canopy, a new driver vision system, and newly designed blades.
While it is in fact powered by the wind, do not hold your breathe for a wind powered vehicle anytime soon, or ever. It is more of a prove of concept and part of a bigger mission of finding innovative solutions for complex problems in the transport and energy domains.
Each year, the team travels to Netherlands to compete in Racing Aeolus, a wind-powered vehicle competition, to vie for the greatest efficiency in terms of average speed ration in relation to wind speed. Last year, the team bagged first place in four out of five competitions during Racing Aeolus. It even set a new world record of 114.87-percent efficiency.
Images: Chinook.
