MANSFIELD — Growing up in Holland, Henry Keultjes spent most of his life around windmills. So it seems natural that someday he’d invent a new way to generate electricity based on those designs.
Keultjes plans to put into the public domain a design called the “switch reluctance wind turbine” that generates electricity in a much more economical fashion. Now 79 years old, it’s an invention he’s been working on for the past decade.
“You’re helping the environment because you’re making a wind turbine available for less cost that’s better that produces more energy for the amount of money,” Keultjes said. “Most of those small wind turbines don’t do anything significant. Now you have this aspect of looking at it differently.”
In 2007, Keultjes made a trip back to Holland for the purpose of visiting the Turby wind turbine factory, with the thought of licensing their unique Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) technology.
“The Turby needed the motor function of its permanent magnet motor/generator to spin the blades to 15 RPM before the turbine would move on wind power on its own,” Keultjes explained. “Because of my environmental concerns related to rare-earth materials used in the manufacture of the permanent magnets, I researched better alternatives and found switched reluctance, a 150-year-old technology that could revolutionize the wind turbine industry by using a recently-available type of fast and powerful solid state switch instead of the original relays.”
Further into the project, Keultjes realized that even with a better type of motor/generator, the electricity produced by the VAWT technology was unlikely to be enough to produce a return on investment for the user. It was then he switched his work to a horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT) design and switched to a five-bladed design.
“Conventional wisdom has it that a three-bladed design is optimal,” Keultjes said. “That may be true for the huge turbines used in wind farms that need room for those complex mechanisms that twists the blades. For the sake of keeping these turbines simpler to build and maintain, I found ample evidence that using five blades would more than make up for that blade twisting ability.”
Huge wind turbines also use pointed blades to reduce turbulence, whereas Keultjes used just the opposite: blades that are not only stubbed but also have tips that bend about 90 degrees. According to Keultjes, these propellers have proven themselves in air races and will improve the performance of these wind turbines while also reducing noise.
To increase reliability of the five-bladed HAWT, Keultjes used a modular stator design that would enable the turbine to generate electricity with even one functional stator.
“One of the most important benefits of using switched reluctance is that the phases are independent, so when one phase goes out the others still work,” Keultjes said. “That also means that they can engage in stages to produce electricity at lower wind-speeds and can even be designed to apply enough torque to act as brakes in electric vesicles with a regeneration function.”
According to Keultjes, this new design has a big potential environmental impact. The same technology can be used not only for wind turbines, but to power things like electric cars or even planes. It is also designed to be self-sufficient and stand on its own rather than be subject to an environmental disaster.
“With this, companies can build better wind turbines for less money so that a farmer who needs a wind turbine can buy it for less and get a bigger return on investment,” Keultjes said.
Keultjes has been drawn to inventing his entire life. Growing up in the center of Operation Market Garden in Holland, Keultjes’ hometown never felt the impact of World War II like the rest of the country because they were completely self-sufficient.
“We had our own cows and pigs and gardens, and I think that is an aspect I really would like to see more emphasis on,” he said.
Keultjes dreamed of attending the Delft University of Technology, what he referred to as Holland’s version of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). But he had one handicap that worried his father: He was blind in his left eye.
“My dad meant well, but he said I couldn’t become an engineer,” Keultjes said. “The doctor in our little town, the guru of everything, he agreed with my dad. So I became an accountant.”
Keultjes went on to become a certified public accountant, which helped him greatly when he started his own businesses later in life. But the itch to create was always there. At age 23, Keultjes came to the United States and began working for a company called Remington.
“They made things like filing cabinets and microfilm, and that’s where I got started,” Keultjes said. “I was in Terre Haute, Indiana at the time, where they have the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. It has a reputation on the level of MIT but it’s very small. I was living real close, and got to interacting with the professors there.”
Keultjes served as the president of Microdyne Company. It was originally a microfilm equipment development company from 1974 to 1990, then an ergonomic chair manufacturing company and 1990 to present an ergonomic chair consulting and development company.
“I had businesses and I sold them, and I thought, what can I do with my…well, call it ‘genius’ or whatever you want to call it,” Keultjes said.
From 2007 to the present, Keultjes has worked on product development for small wind turbines, raised beds, rainwater diverters, composters and, as a joint-development of the switched reluctance generators in the wind turbines, switched reluctance motor/generator development for electric vehicles and other applications like stand-by generators and even electric airplane engines where the light-weight of these switched reluctance products is especially valuable.
The environmental aspect of inventing always appealed to Keultjes, something he attributes to his upbringing in Holland.
“I was growing up in an environment where you really didn’t have any choice,” he said. “You could see the impact of doing things, of saving and composting, and how it ultimately saved lives. Now, I throw a toothpick in the compost. People call that extreme, but I don’t think so. There’s nothing extreme about that.”
It is this environmental mind that prompted Keultjes decide a long time ago to publish his inventions under the creative commons and/or place these inventions in the public domain. His objective is to let anyone and everyone use his invention with the goal that sharing will do the most good, and do so as quick as possible.
According to Keultjes, most inventors are driven by patents and the control and/or monetary rewards that they offer. However, the great majority of patents never recoup the cost of hiring a patent attorney and an even greater majority of patent holders lack the financial resources to defend a patent against the typical large company that employs an army of patent lawyers.
“If you have enough money to fight those big assholes, then you can do something with a patent,” Keultjes said. “But if you don’t have the money to fight them they’re just going to walk all over you, so why bother? Why not make it available to everyone else?
“There’s no way I’m educated enough to fight with the big guys in wind turbines, but there are all kinds of farmers that need those wind turbines,” he continued. “So if I make this available as an open source item, then there are other people that can use it. I’m not sore about it, that’s just the way of the world.”
Keultjes believes in helping each other in order to bring these creative solutions to life.
“It’s like stepping on the shoulders of giants,” he said. “There are many instances where I see something being done and I think it ought to be done differently. I have that all the time.
“I didn’t invent switch reluctance, some guy 150 years ago came up with that. But you have to help each other bring these projects along.”
