8 mega Watt prototype in Østerild, Denmark, February 2014
Credit: Vestas/RenewableEnergyWorld.com
Wind turbines have a number factors limiting their performance:
● Loaded lever arms — “don’t load a lever arm at 90 degrees”, is a fundamental principle of engineering. Wind turbines do exactly that. As a result, wind turbines require up to 700 tons of steel for the tower, to stop it from bending, & up to 4,000 tons of concrete to stop it from being levered out of the ground. Substantially as a result of this, as of Febraury 2014, the most powerful wind turbine in the world was a prototype, capable of generating 8 megaWatts.1
● Forces in a lever arm increase with length — this restricts towers to a height of 150 metres.
● In general, wind velocity increases with altitude.
● Wind power increases as the cube of velocity — e.g. if the the velocity of the wind doubles, power increases 23 = 8 times.
● There’s a lot more wind energy up there, but towers just can’t reach it.
● Subject to wind damage.2
Attaching wind turbines to drones promises to overcome all of these difficulties:
http://www.techthefuture.com/technology/the-trillion-dollar-drone/
Conventional drones also have a future in visual inspections of tower wind turbines
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1 “Meet The New World's Biggest Wind Turbine“ http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/articles/2014/02/meet-the-new-worlds-biggest-wind-turbine.html
2 “Who, what, why: What happens to wind turbines in a storm?” http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-24706238 / searchkeys /
