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A comment on Why Wind Turbines Have Three Blades. Parent comment

Re:Why Wind Turbines Have Three Blades by weinzierl on Friday May 06, 2016 @02:02PM (#11645582)
In the 1980s there was a hype of one and two blade designs.

I always found the one blade designs most fascinating and vividly remember a video of the three one blade rotors of the Monopteros 50. Each blade was 56 m long. There was also GROWIAN, a two blade design with 100 m diameter on a 100 m tower.

All of these projects were abandoned and the towers demolished. The three blade design has won for the reasons you stated.

I searched hard for the Monopteros video but there isn't even a good picture which shows all three towers. By-catch: Wikipedia page about unconventional wind turbines [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconventional_wind_turbines

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Re:Why Wind Turbines Have Three Blades by mikeash on Friday May 06, 2016 @03:27PM (#11646169)
Somewhat related, there are a few airplanes with one-bladed propellors, for example:

http://www.alisport.com/eu/eng/silent2_targa1.htm

In this example, it's used purely because of compactness when stowed.

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