Nomada Q : technology

After a long development process, Altaeros Energies engineers have unveiled the first productive prototype high-altitude wind energy Airborne Wind Turbine. An effort to harness strong winds at high altitude, Altaeros has developed a floating wind turbine that is a cross between a traditional windmill and a dirigible.

After some successful testing, the Altaeros team is hopeful that this new levitation wind turbine can be a viable clean energy option for remote villages, hard-to-reach areas and military zones. Altaeros Energy is one of the few companies specializing in the development of systems to capture the strongest and most stable winds at high altitudes.

CLEAN AND INEXPENSIVE ENERGY CAPTURED AT HIGH ALTITUDE

The technology is designed to capture wind at altitudes of more than 1,000 meters. The design of the Altaeros Airborne wind turbine is quite simple. An inflatable, filled with helium raises it off the ground at high altitudes, where winds are stronger than at ground level. The air turbines are kept balanced by anchors on the ground, which send the electricity generated by the turbine to a battery that feeds it into the grid.

For decades, wind turbines have required huge cranes and towers to lift a few hundred feet off the ground where wind may be insufficient due to low wind speed. Altaeros was founded in 2010 by MIT and Harvard student Ben Glass. Earlier this year, the team completed testing of a thirty-five foot scale prototype of the Airborne wind turbine at the Limestone, Maine location. There, the floating turbine ascended to reach over three hundred feet in altitude. Successfully completing production and endurance tests.

READ IT IN SPANISH: Altaeros Energies presentan Airborne Wind Turbine, La nueva revolución de la energía eolica

The elevation technology is an adaptation of aerostats, or their cousins the passenger airships that for decades have lifted communications equipment and other technology into the air for long periods of time. Aerostats are qualified to resist hurricane-force winds and have safety features that ensure a slow descent to the ground.

Airborne was featured on the March 2011 cover of Popular Mechanics. In December of that same year, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released the required draft guidelines for the new class of airborne wind systems as they were placed in current regulations. Winning first prize in the competition organized by ConocoPhillips Energy, the Boston-based company is currently seeking to partner with other companies to build and test a commercial-scale turbine.

Although the samples we have selected are made with traditional techniques, Dallas-based artist Desmond Blair works with digital art and 3D techniques. With which he reproduces scenarios close to the language of science fiction.

Becoming small graphic passages made in key Pop culture through which Desmond analyzes and gives us through elaborate canvases whose aesthetic result is close at times to hyperrealism, a subjective vision of both those events more related to cultural background and some of its most insigniess figures such as the legendary actor John Wayne.

Known mainly for devoting much of his career in the celluloid world to play tough cowboys of the old west. Or to represent through portraits historical milestones that occurred recently in the United States, as was no more and no less than the election of the first African-American president in over two hundred years of coexistence.

Desmond, who like President Barack Obama, also belongs to the increasingly influential African-American community, intended to pay a heartfelt tribute to this outstanding president and all that he has represented in terms, not only political but above all in the struggle for the conquest of civil rights led by the diversity of minorities that coexist within the North American country.

ART PRODUCT OF HUMAN DUALITY

Based in Dallas where he was born with a malformation in the upper extremities, so that in the end he had to partially amputate his hands. Traumatic fact whose circumstance caused him to develop a special inclination and sensibility for everything that had to do with creative expressions and artistic manifestations.

Intense plastic activity that has allowed him to develop as a subject both in affective and social terms. Designing a whole range of solutions with which already since his training at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he perfected his traditional skills complemented by the help of increasingly digital tools and media, finally focusing on the creation of animation and computer graphics.

READ IT IN SPANISH: Desmond Blair, America Way LIfe Portraits, un reto creativo personal y tecnologico

With which Desmond acquired enough skills to embark on his career as a fine artist, which he did upon his return from UTD where he received his MFA degree in Art and Technology with a commendation as a result. Of his invaluable contribution to the substantial improvement of the educational model aimed at the ever-growing group of people with functional diversity.

A story that highlights the personal improvement through the use of technology applied in the field of art, a fact that is not very common. For the techniques related to learning and pictorial work have remained virtually constant, until the solutions provided from the irruption of the digital age, has allowed a creative hatching can be accessible to more and more people, regardless of their profile shows artistic concerns.