Dang Huu Xuong and his cylindrical wind turbine.

Scientist Dang Huu Xuong has become an inventor not out of want for fame and fortune, but simply by playing with ideas and trying to make everyday items less expensive for everyday people.

Take his mini-radio, for example: the small contraption can be used for a full year on just one small battery. Xuong has spent much of his time devising ways to store electricity in the circuits of small electronics so they use less electricity. He’s also written more than 1,000 articles and 30 books about electronics under his pen name, Dang Hong Quang.

But Xuong’s most recent contribution, the vertical-cylinder wind turbine, could be his biggest success yet if it does indeed bring cheaper electricity to struggling families and businesses the way he says it will.

Where he’d never thought to look

As a scientist, Xuong had spent years trying to bring more electricity-efficient products to low-income families. But after many successes, Xuong decided a couple of years ago that an even better idea would be to make electricity sources cheaper and more efficient instead.

Alternative energies like wind-power technology were already becoming more popular, but Xuong wanted to make a cheaper and easier source of electricity available to families and small businesses getting by on modest incomes.

His first idea was to create individual hydro-power projects that could be used on a small scale, house by house, business by business. But it wasn’t until he was mid-way on a long Hanoi-Ho Chi Minh City train ride last summer that he had an epiphany while drinking a can of coke.

While blankly staring at the can as the train rattled down the tracks, he realized that spinning a cylinder on a vertical axis could be an easier way to generate electricity that the horizontal-axis wind turbines popping up across the globe.

Recalling the realization, Xuong said he knew that windmills were complicated to design and build, and that they needed high-speed winds. He said his scientific instincts told him that a cylinder could be spun vertically without much wind at all. He set out to work as soon as he got off the train.

‘Any interested family’

For 20 days straight, Xuong cut open soda cans and eventually moved on to experimenting with oil drums at his home-laboratory. He began cutting and flaring the drums’ sides to create blades that could catch wind and spin the devices.

He added small accessories “that can be found at any electronics market,” such as driving belts and a dynamo shaft, on which his generator spins to create power. He also added circuits he designed himself to regulate the flow of energy, ensuring that the device delivers the same wattage no matter how fast it is spinning.

“I wanted to create a cheap wind turbine that any interested family can afford,” Xuong said. “I don’t have any ambition to become an inventor. But I always want to make things as efficient as possible.”

He said his spinning drums, which he now builds out of steel or stainless steel at about the size of an oil barrel, can create electric currents of between 50 – 100 watts.

Xuong, 58, said his finished generators cost about VND1-2 million (US$56.15-$112.31). The equipment has a life span of 30-50 years, he said, adding that it could help rural households in Vietnam reduce electricity costs.

Word spreads

A gold shop in the southern province of Binh Duong already runs its billboard and neon lights with a device made by Xuong last year. Several small companies in Ho Chi Minh City and the coastal province of Ba Ria-Vung Tau have also placed orders.

Last April, Lam Ha District in the central highlands province of Lam Dong built and opened a complex of wind turbines using Xuong’s technology

“It’s a fascinating surprise that a used oil drum can be transformed into an electric generator,” Phan Tri Dung, chairman of the board at Petech Company, was quoted by a local newspaper as saying. “In the future, perhaps urban buildings and distant countryside homes alike will use drum-wind turbines.”

VietNamNet/SGGP/Thanh Nien