Saskatoon's Glen Lux wins award for wind turbine design

A Saskatoon man who designed a new wind turbine has won an international award.

Glen Luxreceivedthe prize for sustainable technologiesfrom the magazine NASA Tech Briefs.He improved on earlier versions of a vertical axis turbine that looks like an egg-beater.

" I just used some engineering skills and some intuition and a little bit of luck," Lux said. "And I came up with a design that I thought was hugely beneficial."

A couple of decades ago many engineers thought thevertical axisturbine was better than the horizontal axis turbines in widespread use today, but the vertical axis design was beset with problems,Luxsaid.

[The award]gives me a little more credibility to doing what I'm doing- GlenLux,designed new wind turbine

"They couldn't keep it together," he said. "It has resonance problems, vibrations, torque ripples, things like that."

Lux estimates his design could produce electricity for about half the cost of present-day wind turbines.

He hopes the award will help him find investors to bring his design to market, something he's been having trouble with up to this point.

"[The award]gives me a little more credibility to doing what I'm doing,and maybe somewhere along the line, companies would like to partner or become investors and check this out a little bit further."