Re:Why Wind Turbines Have Three Blades
by Bartweiss on Friday May 06, 2016 @03:48PM
(#11646299)
I can help with this a bit.
The simulations are quite difficult - flow simulation is well-established, but it's a big step from that wind farms. You need to simulate many turbines interacting at a specific site, under a variety of conditions. That's not the problem with modeling single turbines, though.
Rotor design is hard to simulate productively for the same reason that Cringely's analysis is flawed: many of the biggest factors are unrelated to everyday running.
- Even blade counts create resonance patterns that stress your tower.
- High solidity designs suffer more stress in storms (even while stopped), so they break more
- Noise interferes with putting rotors near houses or over pastures
- Storage is difficult and consistency is valuable, so expanding the operating range up to high winds is less useful than expanding it down to low winds
And so on. If you model pure efficiency, the sims are pretty easy. If you model real value, you either can't do it, or you get a search space so jagged that finding maxima is hopeless.
The simulations are quite difficult - flow simulation is well-established, but it's a big step from that wind farms. You need to simulate many turbines interacting at a specific site, under a variety of conditions. That's not the problem with modeling single turbines, though.
Rotor design is hard to simulate productively for the same reason that Cringely's analysis is flawed: many of the biggest factors are unrelated to everyday running.
- Even blade counts create resonance patterns that stress your tower.
- High solidity designs suffer more stress in storms (even while stopped), so they break more
- Noise interferes with putting rotors near houses or over pastures
- Storage is difficult and consistency is valuable, so expanding the operating range up to high winds is less useful than expanding it down to low winds
And so on. If you model pure efficiency, the sims are pretty easy. If you model real value, you either can't do it, or you get a search space so jagged that finding maxima is hopeless.