As global energy consumption levels soar, people seek alternative production from the sun, wind, and water. Of these sustainable technologies, wind arguably proves most efficient in producing large quantities of usable energy. Historically, people harnessed the wind and controlled solar gain through architecture. While the urban application of renewable energy begins to appear in cities, it remains largely as production occurring on the periphery where the most space is available. Citing these fields of production necessitates expanding energy and infrastructure to produce energy where it is needed. What if energy production occurred at the site of consumption? What if production and consumption co-existed equally? What if wind harnessing technologies began to influence architecture? This thesis will study the feasibility and architectural potential for incorporating these renewable technologies into existing urban settings to reduce transmission loss. These buildings will not just be a traditional power plant, but will also teach users about consumption levels, turning the space into a dual-usage program. It is my intention to investigate how buildings can both produce energy and contribute to the public life of cities. / 0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

Renewable energy sources are vital to reduce dependence on fossil fuels that are harmful for the environment and release greenhouse gases causing global warming. Wind energy is a natural source of energy that is abundant in the environment. While wind turbines are most popular, convenient, and used to harvest energy at large scales, there have been recent studies focusing on harvesting energy from the wind for microdevices. Such micro wind energy harvesters can decrease dependence on batteries. In this study, a novel, framed flag micro wind harvester was designed and tested, and its behavior at three different wind speeds was experimentally examined in a wind tunnel. The main purpose of this study is to determine the geometric and wind speed conditions under which regular flapping occurs in the flag material. A high-speed camera was used to visualize the motion of the harvester at different wind speeds and at various parametric ratios of the flag material length to the frame length. The movies taken by the camera are analyzed using Image J software to find the flapping frequency, flapping angle, and the amplitude. Nondimensional parameters such as the Re number and St number also are calculated. This study finds that parametric ratios of 1.1 and 1.2 with the medium wind speed condition of 5 m/s are optimal flapping conditions. These optimal conditions would conveniently allow the use of piezoelectric material as the flag material in order to harvest energy. Further, an advantage of this novel design over previous designs is that the wind harvester naturally aligns with the wind direction and is thus omnidirectional.