Boston’s Additive Edge at Autodesk: Rooftop Wind Gets a 3D Printed Spin

Walking through Autodesk’s Technology Center in Boston, I’ve come to expect surprises. One second, it’s MIT engineers pushing concrete printers to their limits, the next it’s Harvard architects stitching stone waste into walls. Next, I found myself standing beside a vertical-axis wind turbine—six feet tall, six feet wide, built to quietly generate clean power from low-speed urban winds. Designed not for offshore farms but for the rooftops of homes and offices, it’s a different kind of energy machine.

This is the ORB wind turbine, the flagship project of ARC Industries, a renewable-energy startup and Autodesk Research Residency Program team. At the helm is Rob Monteith, a mechanical engineer with a background in renewable systems, who saw a gap in the market: wind power built for cities.

“The industry is pushing toward bigger and bigger turbines,” Monteith told me. “But that leaves out rooftops. We wanted something that could complement solar, especially in places that don’t always get sunlight but do have plenty of wind, like New England.”

Prototyping the Future in Plastic and Hemp

In ARC’s corner of the Technology Center, I saw rows of scaled turbine blades, each with slight variations: grooves, textures, internal latticework. These weren’t just design flourishes. They were experiments, 3D printed to see how airflow could be harnessed more efficiently in a compact, vertical form.

Monteith explained that 3D printing was indispensable in those early phases: “We could rapidly prototype a bunch of blade designs, test them in wind tunnels, then scale up. Some of the internal structures we tried wouldn’t have been possible any other way.”

But the printing doesn’t stop at prototypes. As part of the Residency program, participating teams have access to the equipment that makes further exploration possible. On a large-format Terabot printer in the Technology Center, ARC produced functional parts, including a weatherproofing cover for their new generator. In another experiment, they even looked at a cement 3D printer that’s owned by MIT and made available to residents in the Technology Center to improve the heavy ballast blocks that anchor turbines to rooftops.

Beyond Fiberglass

Traditionally, turbine blades are made of fiberglass, which is strong but hard to recycle. But ARC isn’t a typical startup. As a benefit corporation, it’s required to balance profit with environmental and social goals. That’s why the team is rethinking every part of their turbine through a “cradle-to-cradle lens,” replacing fiberglass with hemp-based composites and experimenting with 3D printed recyclable materials designed to return safely to the ecosystem at the end of their life.

Monteith showed me a prototype blade made from hemp-based composites: “Fiberglass ends up in landfills. We’re working with hemp composites and other materials that can be recovered or biodegraded at the end of their life. 3D printing lets us test those materials quickly.”

That sustainability commitment extends into ARC’s modular design. Like solar panels, the ORB turbines can be installed as single units or in arrays across a roof. Each turbine produces about 3 kilowatts, which is enough to power a single-family home under rated wind conditions.

From Pilots to Policy

ARC has already launched pilots in Burlington, Vermont, and Nashville, Tennessee. In Burlington, they’re working directly with the municipal utility, Burlington Electric.

“Permitting and regulation, however, are still uncharted territory,” Monteith said. “The big wind farms have regulations. But rooftop wind is a gray area. Every town, every state is different. We’re working with engineers to set safety factors, because right now, the rulebook doesn’t exist.”

Like other residents in the Technology Center in Boston, ARC relies on Autodesk for tools and community. Monteith has spent more than four years here, long enough to see how working near other teams leads to unexpected collaborations.

“It’s made everything possible,” he noted. “We’re a small team. Without this space, we’d have to outsource so much. Here we can test technologies we wouldn’t have thought of, and see if they fit our process. Having access to all these machines means we can keep more of our manufacturing local — working with mold makers in Rhode Island and building our generators right here in Massachusetts.”

That includes collaborations with a startup working on hemp composites and conversations with Autodesk engineers about large-format printing for structural parts.

Despite the progress, Monteith admits that building hardware isn’t easy.

“Every investor wants software because it scales fast,” he said. “But hardware is different; there’s a lot more moving parts, especially when you start thinking about scaling up production. You’re going to hit a lot of roadblocks, but you just have to keep working at it. We’ve been at this for several years and know that persistence is everything. So, just keep at it. Persistence is critical.”

Standing beside ARC’s half-scale prototype, I thought about that persistence, how a turbine designed for rooftops could one day spin above Boston’s skyline, powered not just by wind, but by the creativity running through Autodesk’s lab.

This article is part of the “Boston’s Additive Edge at Autodesk” series, highlighting projects and research taking shape inside Autodesk’s Technology Center in Boston.

All images courtesy of 3DPrint.com