South America’s Atacama Desert is known for two things: dust and wind.
As Earth’s driest region, it’s an otherworldly place where barely anything lives — and nothing thrives. Not the sort of place you’d expect to find a team of scientists working on the most advanced technologies in the world.
Nestled between two mountain ranges, temperatures on this plateau can vary by as much as 50°C in a day. The Atacama is so inhospitable that biologists were actually surprised to find living organisms there.
But it is this barren quality which first attracted NASA’s engineers to the Atacama. Photographs taken by the Mars Curiosity rover show that Earth’s own lifeless, red wasteland bears a striking resemblance to our interplanetary neighbour. According to NASA, “due to its extreme dryness, the Atacama Desert in Chile is one of the most important environments on Earth for researchers who need to approximate the conditions of Mars”.
For NASA, the Atacama the perfect place to test the equipment they hope will explore another planet 33.9 million miles away. But this playground for NASA engineers was also a graveyard for the devices defeated by the desert. It was one of these failures that inspired a young, Chilean engineer to solve a problem that defeated NASA’s greatest minds, changing the course of his life forever and winning the 2018 JDA — but more on that later.
In 1995 a team from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) travelled south to test a new rover concept for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The vehicle in question had been tested years earlier in the Mojave Desert, another of our planet’s otherworldly environments. It had performed well but now it was time for Earth’s toughest test.
The rover looked like an American child’s “big-wheel” tricycle. But what made it different was the wheels; three inflatable yellow orbs linked together and designed to be propelled onwards only by the wind. NASA hoped that Mars’ winds would blow the rover across the planet’s surface.
Michael Smith, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, explains, “every year there are some moderately big dust storms that pop up on Mars and once every three Mars years (about 5 ½ Earth years), on average, normal storms grow into planet-encircling dust storms, and we usually call those ‘global dust storms’ to distinguish them”. But, Despite terrifying depictions of raging storms in sci-fi movies, Mars’s winds rarely exceed 60mph thanks to the planet’s low-density atmosphere. This is less than half the speed of Earth’s hurricane-force winds. Referencing the 2015 blockbuster film The Martian, Smith explains “it is unlikely that even these dust storms could strand an astronaut on Mars. Even the wind in the largest dust storms likely could not tip or rip apart major mechanical equipment.”
Nevertheless, wind-powered propulsion on the Red Planet is theoretically possible. At least, this was the hypothesis NASA’s team wanted to prove when they brought their inflatable-wheeled rover prototype to the Atacama in 1995.
It was soon clear that their 1.5metre inflatable balls worked well in the desert winds — too well, as it turns out.
When the unpredictable desert winds picked up more than expected, one of the rover’s three wheels was ripped from its rig and rolled away. Though this accident helped the engineers to realise they’d over complicated their design, it can’t have been an overly concerting thought for them as they were chasing their prototype as it barrelled over a nearby sand dune, never to be seen again.
After this failure, the wheels came off NASA’s plans for an inflatable wheeled rover. But it did inspire them to work on a new project: “Tumbleweed”.
To explain the aims of Project Tumbleweed, it’s important to first understand that, so far, the unmanned exploration of the Moon and Mars has been very slow. To date, the Mars Curiosity rover has travelled just 12 miles since it landed on the surface over 2,100 sols ago in 2012. Even the Apollo 15 Lunar Roving Vehicle only covered 17 miles on the surface of the Moon. Protecting the delicate scientific research instruments on these missions has taken priority over humanity’s more natural desire to travel as fast as it can. It was this need for speed which Project Tumbleweed wanted to remedy.
Tumbleweed’s eureka moment came from the Pathfinder mission to Mars, which used inflatable airbags to protect the Sojourner rover when it impacted on the planet’s surface. It became clear on satellite imagery that the detached airbags, blown by the wind, had travelled significantly further than the rover they had been created to protect.
Deciding to harness these winds, the team behind Tumbleweed explored ideas to power a rover using this wind, including sails and gliders. Tumbleweed, was a giant inflatable orb, however, to date the none of these experiments made it off Earth’s surface.
However, at the same time as NASA’s experiment was winding down, an 18-year-old Chilean inventor, Nicolas Orellana, was preparing a wind-powered experiment of his own.
Nicolas, now 37, is a desert man, born-and-bred. He understands the raw power of the dust and wind that eventually blew NASA’s researchers home. By chance, just as they were flying back to the US, Nicolas was in his garage working on a sail-powered car which he would soon be testing in the desert.
His vehicle looked like a four-wheeled reclining bicycle which someone had attached a ship’s sail to the front of. When Nicolas experimented with it in the desert, two things became immediately clear. The first was that it successfully harnessed the Atacama’s winds. The second was that his vehicle had a fatal flaw. The sail was in front of the driver’s seat and limited his ability to see anything. Nobody would be driving this vehicle, but for Nicolas, the inventor’s journey was just beginning.
Two years later, Nicolas was in his third year studying industrial design at Chile’s Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (PUVC). He’d changed courses after leaving a six-year course in architecture halfway through.
“I just wanted to do something more practical, more hands-on,” he explains.”
“In architecture I would take a piece of paper, and use it to build something that looked like something — often, a building. But in industrial design, I would take the same piece of paper and build something that actually did something. That’s a big difference for me, it was a big change.”
For his final year project, Nicolas dusted off and wheeled out his old sail-car. But, the tutor he showed it to told him to go away and make something “autonomous” instead. So he took his idea back to the drawing board.
Nicolas knew from his failed experiments in the desert that a sail-car without a driver wasn’t much use. And from NASA’s failure, to which he had paid close attention, he knew that unmanned, wind-powered vehicles have a nasty habit of blowing away, never to be seen again.
As part of an annual trip, Nicolas and his class mates had spent the previous summer making kites. They had stitched together the waterproof fabric in raincoats to create vents which kept the kite facing one way by making vents to guide the air.
“I started analysing these fabric prototypes,” says Nicolas. “I ripped them apart, took the material, and built something entirely different.”
The resulting device was an unusual object named Viaje — Spanish for “Journey”. It comprised two large metal rings, parted by a vented fabric structure. Nicolas had seen from his peer’s kites that wind could be directed through vents to keep an object moving in a single direction. The irregular shape of Viaje’s rings combined with these directional vents meant that it would always roll in one direction.
Nicolas explains, “it was made to work with side winds. If side winds worked perfectly, backward winds would push it forward, and front wind would push it back. That’s basically it.”
Nicolas’s rover solved a problem Project Tumbleweed didn’t seem to have realised it’d had.
“I remember looking at the Mars rover NASA had been testing near my home, watching this ball bounce over the surface, and I thought: ‘If you want to explore the whole surface you will need many of them’. But if you were to drop lots of them all at once in one location, the wind would just take them all in the same way. It would be pointless, they wouldn’t be spreading out, they’d just follow the same path.”
Instead, Viaje would only travel forwards and backwards. Nicolas’s device allowed a Mars explorer to pick a direction and keep going indefinitely. Even with Mars’ weak winds, Nicolas estimated that his rover could travel almost 1,500 miles per sol — an improvement on the current rover, Opportunity, which has managed 28 miles since 2004.
“Well, I wouldn’t have said better,” Nicolas modestly replies. “It was a different solution to the same problem. For me, it was an academic exercise. I wasn’t thinking of applying to NASA.” He did however send them an email at the time saying that he’d solved their problem. They never replied.
Nicolas’ Viaje may have solved a problem but it also raised a new question. What should he do with this new technology? NASA wasn’t interested so there was little chance that it would ever reach Mars. He also realised that there isn’t much commercial need for a wind powered, desert rover. Viaje was therefore shelved and Nicolas abandoned his project for 12 years.
Nicolas decided to go back to university after being forced to close the architecture and property development firm he’d been running with his brother, also an engineer. After a client was unable to pay them, the brothers had been forced to file for administration — teaching Nicolas the hard way that business can be as “fickle as the wind”.
He swapped Chile for the UK where he began studies for his master’s degree at Lancaster University. Throughout this period, Nicolas’s parents took any opportunity to remind him that he has an incredible but unused invention just sitting on the shelf.
“They kept insisting I should try to use it to create energy,” Nicholas says. “But I was focusing on my business and then on my studies so I didn’t do anything with it. But then suddenly I was finishing my masters and I found that I had quite a bit of spare time,” he explains. “I finally had the chance to do something with Viaje.”
His scholarship still had a few months left to run giving him free and easy access to laboratories, testing equipment and prototyping kits which could otherwise cost thousands of pounds to buy, or indeed rent.
“By chance, at the same time, I found out about the James Dyson Award, I was really keen on taking the opportunity to see if I could finally make it real. You can’t plan on winning a competition like this. Of course, I wanted to,” he laughs “but I couldn’t take that for granted. Instead, I just wanted to see how far I could take it. £30,000 makes a huge difference at this point — it lets you turn an idea into a reality.”
Nicolas decided to take his now 12-year-old Viaje to his final year tutor to ask how he should progress the project. He knew he wanted to investigate wind energy but wasn’t sure exactly how to develop the core technology in his rover.
The professor suggested that since Viaje can use side winds, it might also be able to take side flows, perhaps even under water. But, in order to do this, it would make more sense if Nicolas could make it “omnidirectional”.
This latter point was at first ignored as a bit of wishful thinking. Nevertheless, Nicolas immediately took the plunge and started converting his wind-powered rover into an underwater turbine. He knew he was going to need help.
“We were classmates,” says Nicolas describing how he met his future design partner, Yaseen Noorani. “During some of our joint projects I saw that [Yaseen] was able to actually design and build a prototype, but also that he could take them to market. That’s a skill that not everyone has.”
Yaseen, 24, grew up in Nairobi, Kenya, before travelling to the UK where he studied Mechatronic and Robotic engineering as an undergraduate at the University of Sheffield.
“I met with Yaseen I said: ‘I want to turn [Viaje] into an underwater turbine, let’s go and see if it works.” Yaseen didn’t take much convincing. From this point the pair worked tirelessly as partners, with Yaseen helping Nicolas to realise the 3D-printed prototypes they needed to test in Lancaster University’s labs.
Soon they had their first turbine, but when Nicolas spoke with a tidal power expert they immediately told him that it wouldn’t work under water.
It wasn’t the answer they’d been hoping to hear.
Unwilling to give up and knowing that the idea already worked well in wind, Nicholas decided to pivot back to generating wind power. The pair arranged another meeting with a wind power expert at the university in just two days’ time. The only problem was they didn’t have a wind-powered turbine prototype to show them.
Realising that he would need to work fast, Nicolas once again went back to the drawing board.
Pressure is a great creative performance enhancer, at least it certainly was in Nicolas’s case. By deciding to shred another one of his ideas, Nicolas found himself looking at the problem with fresh eyes for the first time in nearly 12 years. For reasons that are only clear to him, he decided, perhaps with the advice of his tutor ringing in his ears, to try to make his new wind turbine “omnidirectional”.
“I read about the theory of making it omnidirectional so I decided to mock up a paper prototype. I instinctively had the solution in my head, I didn’t really ask anyone I just did it overnight. In those two days, it became an omnidirectional wind turbine.”
Nicolas and Yaseen arrived at their meeting with an entirely new device to present to the wind energy experts; their newly christened O-Wind Turbine.
“When they approached us about testing for a new wind turbine design, we first thought it would just be the 23rd variation of some vanilla system,” says Harry Hoster, director of Energy Lancaster at Lancaster University. Instead, he was pleasantly surprised.
As Harry explains, when the pair first showed him their prototype he was “excuse the pun, blown away. Only holding it in your hands and playing with it gives you a chance to understand what their new device actually does and how, if things go right, its ability to capture any random breezes will take urban energy harvesting to a whole other level.”
O-Wind could capture winds which could come from any direction. This was a game-changer.
The O-Wind Turbine is a 25cm sphere which is covered in geometric vents. It sits on a fixed axis and spins when wind hits it — from any direction.
Yaseen explains the bigger problem which O-Wind wants to fix: “Wind power produces just four per cent of the world’s electricity even though it could produce up to 40 times the electricity we consume. Existing wind farms are isolated to open, rural areas as they only capture horizontal wind. If we could find a solution that caters for the half of the world’s population who live in cities we could give these people an opportunity to generate their own energy.”
O-Wind’s roots may be in the Atacama Desert, but it is an invention designed for metropolises of the future. The pair even trialled their idea while studying abroad for six months in Guangzhou, China’s fifth largest city. Yaseen says that the experience “really brought to life the impact that an urban solution to sustainable power generation could play in our future.”
Their invention had solved one of the major problems that has kept wind power on the periphery of renewable energy schemes. Large off-shore wind turbines often sit idle and cost huge sums of money and many engineering hours to maintain. O-Wind offers a simple, elegant solution which could one day be installed on virtually every building in every city.
In an event hosted by the JDA’s patron, Sir James Dyson, on 15h November 2018, Nicolas and Yaseen’s O-Wind Turbine was announced as this year’s International Winner. The award comes with £30,000 prize money to help take their invention to the next level, as well as £5,000 for their university.
Looking back at the history of this (now) award-winning invention, it is clear that O-Wind is a device which is defined by failure. It was rose from the ruin of a failed NASA experiment, and had many incarnations on its way to become a turbine — including as a Mars rover, an underwater turbine, and even a sail car. There were long periods when it sat forgotten on a shelf, or was nearly destroyed forever. The journey from the Atacama to winning the 2018 JDA has been chaotic and volatile. But, just like the winds that power this invention, O-Wind’s potential now seems almost limitless.
