About Us

Welcome to our website.  This product was inspired by our work on the origami design of structures.  We put so much effort into a theory of origami design that we thought we should "put our efforts to work" by considering an application of overwhelming importance to society: the generation of power with no greenhouse gas emissions.  As happens in such cases, we soon found ourselves straying from origami design (though some aspects remain) and really thinking about what is wrong, and what is missing, in wind power generation.  We came to the conclusion that a well-designed Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) has enormous potential.
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Experts and novices alike seem to know what is wrong with existing VAWTs:  they have an active side and a parasitic side. The active side produces torque and contributes to the power output, while the parasitic side produces negative torque and decreases the power output. Our design eliminates the parasitic side (see Performance, above).  We foresee broad application of our design on roof tops in urban areas, for the homeowner in the suburbs, for the exurban resident, for the farmer who wants a robust power source, and for some of the 775 million people on earth who do not have access to electricity.

Our design was conceived by Huan Liu and Richard James at the University of Minnesota and refined by advanced machine learning algorithms informed by hundreds of supercomputer simulations. We thank Technology Commercialization at UMN. The design was an offshoot of work supported by US Department of Defense: a Multi-University Research Initiative (MURI) project on origami design of structures (000142312754), and a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship (N00014-19-1-262).