KwikFab
Assembly Line
The Birmingham Blade: the world's first geographically tailored urban wind turbine designed by AI
AI design specialists EvoPhase and precision metal fabricators KwikFab have unveiled the world’s first urban wind turbine designed by AI, and tailored to the unique wind conditions of a specific geographic area. The team has called it the Birmingham Blade. The collaboration between EvoPhase and KwikFab provides a solution to one of the most pressing issues in the green energy landscape – how to produce small-scale, affordable, generators of clean wind energy.
EvoPhase used its AI-driven design process to generate and test designs for their efficiency at wind speeds found in Birmingham, which, at 3.6 metres / second are substantially lower than the 10 metres per second rating for most turbines. EvoPhase found the optimal design for curved blades which spin around a central point, and confirmed that that it will be up to seven times more efficient than existing designs used in the Birmingham area.
Developed by a research group led by Dr Kit Windows-Yule at the University of Birmingham, EvoPhase’s AI-led evolutionary design process mimics natural selection, this approach allows for simultaneous optimisation of many different parameters, avoiding traditional trade-offs between performance factors. The EvoPhase – KwikFab collaboration provides a rapid design and prototyping service, and the team is now working on another design for the very different conditions in Edinburgh.