Wind turbines face a paradoxical challenge: they must extract the wind’s kinetic energy while still allowing the air to pass. In this Minute Physics video, Henry gives a crash course Keep reading
Tag: wind turbine
Wind Turbine Physics
Over the years, wind turbines have gotten tall with long, thin blades. This MinutePhysics video delves into the reasons for those changes. They’re all aimed at generating more wind power Keep reading
Vertical Axis Wind Turbines
Most people are familiar with the propeller-like shape of conventional wind turbines. These turbines can be more than 100m tall and can generate several megawatts apiece, but placing them in Keep reading
Turbine Wakes in the Sea
What we we build always has an impact on the environment around us. The white dots you see in the image above are an array of offshore wind turbines, standing Keep reading
Visualizing Flow with Snowfall
One of the challenges in engineering and operating wind turbines is that full-scale turbines rarely behave as predicted in smaller-scale laboratory experiments and simulations. One way to reconcile these differences Keep reading
Researching Wind Turbines
Two of the most awesome things (in my admittedly biased opinion) about fluid dynamics are the amazing facilities we build for experiments and the tests they allow us to do. Keep reading
Vertical-Axis Wind Turbines
Vertical-axis wind turbines (VAWT) are an alternative to traditional wind turbine designs. Unlike their more common cousins, VAWTs rotate about a vertical axis and are omni-directional, meaning that they do Keep reading
Turbine Blade Separation
[original media no longer available] Maintaining consistent air flow along the contours of an object is key to aerodynamic efficiency. When air flow separates or forms a recirculation zone, the Keep reading
Tip Vortex
Smoke released from the end of a test blade shows the helical pattern of a tip vortex from a horizontal-axis wind turbine. Like airplane wings, wind turbine blades generate a Keep reading
Measuring Wind Turbines with Snowfall
One of the challenges in large-scale wind energy is that operating wind turbines do not behave exactly as predicted by simulation or wind tunnel experiments. To determine where our models Keep reading