The World Trade Center at Baharain has Giant Wind Turbines!

The first ever fully self sufficient building.

Takes nothing from the eco-system, claims to give nothing to the ecosystem.

The “World Trade Centre” means a lot of electricity and by lot, I mean enormous, gigantic, herculean amount of electricity. The architects at the Atkins Design Company came out with a really innovative method of countering the problem – wind energy, harnessed by the building itself. The shape of two identical 50 storey buildings is such that it concentrates the wind breeze blowing around the building in between it, like the wings of an aeroplane. The speed of wind increases exponentially as it reaches the centre of the two towers. One turbine was insufficient, the trade center alone required 3 wind turbines. The architect (sorry, I forgot the name) used bridges to fix turbines in these areas.

The concept of turbines on bridges has been there for some time – “Caesar Pelli” tried to fix a gigantic turbine on the bridge of petronas but the mammoth concrete columns, weak in tension, would fail due to the to and fro motion of turbine and bridge. Here, the steel structure has three bridges tied via springs to counter the to fro action of turbine. further, giant hydraulic pistons are attached to the spring system so that the oscillating frequencies of the bridge and the turbines are slightly different. Thus the vibrations of turbines do not match with the vibrations of the bridge; in this case a state of resonance would have formed and the turbine oscillations would continuously increase the oscillation amplitude of bridge, which in turn would soon break.

There is also a shopping center just below the turbines, which generates the revenue of the WTC employees. There is also a giant underground water filtration plant, which takes care of the portable and plantation water needs. It seems with the emergence of Saudi Arabia and Dubai in the map of architecture, not wanting to be left behind, the small country of Bahrain has made some interesting and eye-popping developments in the realm of green architecture. these people created the much talked about but never attempted “Ecologically Inert Architecture” in 2006. Take a glimpse of this art…

To visit the official website of Bahrain World Trade Center go to: http://www.bahrainwtc.com/

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