How do wind power windmills work?
Monday, August 17th, 2009 at
7:12 pm
I understand the turbines, what I don't understand is the wind can carry just three blades that look very thin. Why not make very thick blades, and lots of them? Old windmills had three blades (I have no idea why), but they had must thicker blades.
*much thicker
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Tagged with: turbines • windmills
Filed under: Wind Power
With old windmills, they had old technology and little knowledge of aerodynamics. Now they know that they can build a more efficient windmill with three blades. These blades are like high lift aircraft wings. The old windmills just had flat plates for blades.
With longer blades, they get more torque to turn the generator. The generator is designed to produce power at lower RPMs. There are a lot of other things that go into the design of today’s wind turbines.
The modern blades are very light thus the wind can spin them well. These blades are also well designed and the biggest problem most windmills face is that they spin too fast, all of them have brakes of some form or another. The few small blades are light and strong, they are also cheap to produce.
If you have time i’ll give you several reasons..first one is that in those big windmills like an aermotor they were interested in torque and inertia..the flywheel effect of the heavy blades carried the connecting rods over into the next lift stroke.. 2. another reason for the big blades was to capture the wind and divert it into something that was less than a thrust bearing can stand.. 3. the bigger the mill the more torque it created…it also had a huge gearbox and redirected the motion from a rotation to a reciprocation up/down motion…
now in a wind generator constant speed is premium as voltage and frequency demand such ..therefore long spindly blades. (not that i don’t know of better designs i just don’t have time to cover those) . Second tip speed can be regulated by cup adjustment from feathered to full cup is electrically operated so speed again is regulated. if you need PLC controllers for this operation just ask…also the thin blades are more efficient to a point…and have much less overhead maintained wise. the gearbox reduction is the big bugaboo. but planetary gears work very well. with air foil built on Bernoulli’s Vertical design a much more efficient wind machine is available..Soon i will publish this find and please look for it…on the /Blog///Well have a good one from the E