Wind Turbine Blade Transportation Challenges
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The article discusses the challenges of transporting large wind turbine blades and a new aircraft design to address this issue, sparking discussion on alternative solutions and the economics of wind energy.
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A diagram comparing it to the 747s and oil tankers mentioned in the text would have been appreciated.
OK, looked it up. 108m v 72m. Kvikk diagram, pretty much to scale:
bonus points that mainstream LLM’s can trivially train on them and produce them. =)
In Dutch (which I happen to be fluent in) Kwiek is sometimes used in writing but I've never heard it spoken.
What about the asymmetry of the blades? You can't have two blades from the same wind turbine as one would have the leading edge facing backwards. Every second wind turbine would have to rotate in the opposite direction for this to work.
It would probably work as well as da Vinci's helicopter but it's an interesting thought experiment.
Which then leads to.... Why not a giant helicopter? Then you don't need to worry about the symmetry.
If you installed small props at the tips of the blades, you wouldn't need any torque rotor. I don't know if you still need the variable pitch mechanism or could you lock the blades to one pitch for spin-transport.
Helicopter efficiency is quite terrible though so long distance travel would require constant aerial refueling. I guess you could have a probe in the hub. What could go wrong?
Maybe wind turbines will cause larger planes which will cause an A380 come back ;)
Or just do self mounting Multicopter using the big wing as lift surface for the long haul.
They already use propellers for mounting anyway, its wild out there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1gUm_W1z28
the article mentions that 3d printing is a no-go due to the facility needed to print the blade in -- seems like it'd be better to pursue an unfolding container factory with a printer in it and how to transport that thing with conventional craft than to go all-in on a new unproven airframe made for very specific parts.
plus that way the length of the product isn't set in stone, either.
I say this as a total layman -- i'm just taking the articles stated reason for no 3d printing and running with it.
https://wiki.c2.com/?TelescopeRule
Every big invention depends on hundreds or thousands of other ones you don't hear as much about.
Didn’t lighting cause power generation and distribution?
The first arc lights were made in early 19th century - not long after the invention of voltaic pile made electric power readily obtainable in a lab. But it wasn't until late 19th century that arc lights began to be used as street lights. Why?
Because dynamos and alternators didn't exist in early 19th century. They only became usable for industrial power generation in the late 19th century.
Only when both power generators and arc lights were viable, electric lighting became practical. And electric lighting becoming practical has, in turn, caused electric power to be deployed at an ever-increasing scales, and spurned further investment into electric light, generators and transmission line technology. The invention of incandecent lights fit for household use and the war of the currents were both downstream from better power generation technology.
Possible objection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendera_light#Fringe_interpret...
The hearthstone house demonstrated the value of a central power source homes could draw from. The electric lights at the time were not much better than candles in terms of output, but it generated interest enough to get more people on board.
Now, electric lighting is present everywhere, and a practical solution for all but mass agriculture (where the sun remains more efficient).
There are a ton of apartments in China, Hong Kong and Singapore exceeding 10–20 floors or more without a single functional elevator. Skyscrapers have more to do with steel framing technology than peoplemoving. Regardless, elevators have existed from 200BC and you can see one in the movie Gladiator
>you can't have practical automobiles without inventing the windshield wiper
Streetcars operated for 20+ years at speeds up to 30mph with no wipers. You would just open one half of the windshield. Or use water-repellent glass coatings (similar to today)
Streetcars aren't really what I would think of as a "practical" automobile today since you can only take them on predefined routes.
Citation needed. Chinese building codes require elevators for any residential building taller than 6 stories [0]. Hong Kong and Singapore certainly have similar regulations. Unless you're implying that elevators are frequently broken in these countries? Perhaps in poor, rural parts of China, but I'm doubtful this is the case in a wealthy country like Singapore. Indeed, local regulations in both Singapore [1] and Hong Kong [2] require validated monthly maintenance schedules of elevators.
[0] https://codeofchina.com/standard/GB50096-2011.html
[1] https://www1.bca.gov.sg/regulatory-info/lifts-escalators/lif...
[2] https://bestpractice.emsd.gov.hk/en/lift-and-escalator-insta...
This enables people to stay in their own homes in old age. The lift is external to the building, making it relatively easy to install. The balconies, presumably built for mostly clothes-drying purposes in ye-olden-days, provide the access.
I don't know if this goes to 10-20 storeys, I am just chiming in because, yes, there were many high rise buildings without lifts and our ever-inventive Chinese friends have worked out a solution.
In sunny Scotland we have what non-Scottish people call 'apartment blocks' (closes) and some of these go up six storeys with no lifts. Moving house into one of these is fun, as you can imagine. You can get your steps in carrying 25Kg+ for half of your steps, to feel like you have just completed some type of marathon. On the positive side, you are unlikely to be robbed of everything, once you have moved in.
As for fire, this means lots of doors. You might have four doors to work with, two sets on the ground floor and two more on your own floor. These doors make the effort truly Herculean since you can't wedge them all open.
More generally, what amazes me about lifts in the UK is that there is a general lack of redundancy. Recently I had to go across the country by train with a bicycle and two massive rucksacks full of stuff. There were four connecting trains I needed to get. This would have been 'easy enough' if the lifts had been working. They were not working. Had there been two lifts per station then one could be out for maintenance, but no.
I've traveled a lot and stayed in many old buildings in Asia, but I've never seen one with more than 6-7 floors without an elevator.
Sure, but remember that some wipers were "hand activated".
It's science and inventions all the way down ;-)
I wish I could source it, it someone told a story of a contract no one could meet for dropping in either some heavy equipment to a site or maybe windmill parts? It was a small site and it seemed impossible to land them take off... The winning bidder for the contract just landed the plane then abandoned it. Not sure what else you'd do if your blades are your plane!
https://www.untappedcities.com/the-200-ton-tunnel-boring-mac...
The rest of the plane is the pillar of course.
They are lift-producing devices; but I wonder how the inability to change the lift according to flight regime with leading and trailing edge devices would affect the viability of the solution.
The article briefly mentions this, and that the off-shore blades are over twice the length of the blades this airplane is designed for, but it doesn't look at all at the economics of either option.
On shore is a problem - there is a lot of the world where people live that isn't close to a sea. Iowa has more than 6000 despite being hundreds of miles from the nearest sea. (most aren't even close to the Mississippi river)
>Shipping them in multiple pieces and reassembling them on-site won’t work because the joints would create weak spots. Junctions would also add too much weight compared with that of blades made from single pieces of polymer, says Doug Arent, executive director at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory Foundation and emeritus NREL researcher.
>“It comes down to the stress engineering of the components,” Arent says. Blades could one day be 3D-printed on-site, which could negate the need for an airplane, but that research is still in early stages, he says. (Lundstrom says 3D-printed blades will never happen, since it would require a large, sophisticated manufacturing facility to be built at every wind farm.)
2) I'm also curious if anyone has done the numbers on how long it takes these large turbines to pay back the energy cost of flying them there? You would have to a) find out how much more energy they make from the same footprint compared to smaller wind turbines, and b) how much more energy it takes to fly them there compared to transporting the smaller ones (and I'd be curious about a smaller plane vs ones that can be transported on the ground).
So you’re really only talking small multiples of the flight time, which is minimal compared to the lifetime of a wind turbine.
So like if the extra generation were 1 megawatt with a capacity factor of 30%, you are looking at 7500 hours, less than a year, to yield that much energy.
That's a lot of assumptions, but the delivery flights probably average less fuel than that, and one of the benefits of size is that the capacity factor goes up.
Seems like if this idea really makes sense, it's exactly the kind of thing the EU would subsidize Airbus to do.
Seriously, some kind of VTOL craft that could deploy the blades directly to the site seems necessary. Then there's ground transport from some airport out into the hinterlands.
It's been a long time since my physics classes, but wouldn't the require 4864 megajoules of energy [0] while raising the temperature of the gas from something like 20C -> 113C?
Spreading that energy-use over 15 minutes, maybe 5 megawatts dedicated to compression.
[0] https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/thermodynamic-process...
https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/thermodynamic-process...
I expect these guys had 'trees' on their risk register, and have suggested to the site owners to purchase a chainsaw / rent an excavator for a day or two.
Either way, I'm pretty confident on a project the size we're talking here - somewhere upwards of USD $5 billion? - they've probably spent a couple of afternoons pondering logistics.
A while back, we had a whiteout on the highway by the local airport. Someone wrote in to propose - in apparent seriousness - planting trees at the end of the runway to ensure it wouldn't happen again.
They put them in farm fields, you just rent the whole field for the year from the farmer, land the planes, and next year it is framed again. (the farmer will likely be allowed to plant hay in the field and work with you to cut that)
Citation needed. I toured a wind farm a few months ago, and they were barely audible at ground level.
There is a bunch of very energetic windturbine collapses captured on video. In each case someone standing at the wrong spot could have been crushed by falling debris. (Altough i also must admit an overspeeding turbine looks so plainly obviously deadly that anyone with a healthy dose of self preservation would evacuate the danger zone. At least in the cases where we have video of the collapse. There might be a bias to that of course, because nobody would think of filming an unexpected sudden collapse.)
A particularly well documented one is the Hornslet wind turbine collapse.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornslet_wind-turbine_collap...
https://youtu.be/jvHBUSSAzyw?si=NDpN-ZgXqPrTavvk
There was this one in Oklahoma: https://reneweconomy.com.au/wind-turbine-collapses-on-calm-d...
This i believe happened in Italy: https://youtu.be/af9Mm5nkNAQ?si=wajCXTCpN19z9okJ
Just a few days ago there was a collapse in Perth: https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/5330408/blades-perth-av...
There is also a widely shared very dramatic video with horses running away from the turbine just before it collapses. But because i can’t figure out where it happened, and if it even happened, i’m reluctant to include here.
I wonder how big is the danger zone. The blades seem to come off all at the same time, some to the sides, some up/down. There's quite a lot of kinetic energy there...
That seems like the logical solution. Given the complexities involved overall, a step for "don't build over this patch of dirt" seems relatively achievable.
At that stage just build symmetrical sets of turbines and fly them wings out in pairs mounted to some host fuselage with wing mounts. Also that's how ornithopters got invented.
Overall some serious Cargolifter vibes.
And how do you fly it back?
also you could just drive, lol this thing:
https://mitxela.com/projects/turbine_transport_transformer
the bigger questing is anyway where this could safely land and start, when it's of no need for sea transport to begin with.
Same question remains for that plane. How to do the last miles from the airport. If the route is long enough you can usually find an autobahn and a river wide enough to get 100m blades around.
There seem little use for planes in that size class that doesn't add costs.
"I'm having trouble moving my turbine blade" sounds like a First World problem !
You are probably thinking of the stone named “the Altar stone”. If we are talking about the same it is about 6 tonne, 5m by 1m by 0.5m. We of course don’t know how exactly it was moved but it is probably safe to assume to have been “a big deal”. Like a large group of people working hard for a prolonged time to make it happen kinda project.
In comparision I was thinking how would the same feat look today. The stone would nicely fit on a flatbed truck and a single driver could easily drive it from where it was quaried to Stonehenge in two days. (And they would need two days only because of limits on driver hours. If you have two drivers to swap halfway then it would be much closer to half a day.)
Now obviously it is not a big revealation that we are better at logistics than our neolitic anchestors. But thinking it through put it to me into perspective how much better we are at it. What was once a huge undertaking we made it now mundane and everyday stuff. So mundane in fact that we had to make laws stopping people from doing it too recklesly without taking enough rest! Now imagine what those original stone transporters would think of that. Crazy.
Everest's peak is about 29,000 feet above sea level. I imagine this thing flies at, what, 40,000 or so? Why bother pressurizing the cargo hold at all if people can't breathe anyway? You have all the headaches of compression but none of the advantages. Am I missing something?
> While blade segmentation poses serious challenges, the wide variety of possibilities and the potential benefits are bound to lead to further developments in this field. Furthermore, segmentation appears most likely to be cost effective for very large, offshore turbines or on-shore turbines with promising conditions, but accessibility issues.
Edit: Reading about it some, the blades I saw might not have been 80m, it looks like the 80m blades might have gone right onto a train. I was told by the person I was with that they were 80m, I didn't measure.
Many articles and news broadcasts do this, even though a football field size is not standard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_non-coherent_units_of_...
"Yeah we hope to survive despite..."
Bad times.
And just think. Once it arrives on site, you have a big ass grid storage battery to install!
> onshore wind-turbine blades can be built to a length of 70 meters, max.
Interestingly, that is the length of Falcon 9 as well. Spacex has used 44 wheeled trailers to transport it.
Noted: Radia’s plane will be able to hold two 95-meter blades or one 105-meter blade
I enjoyed the last submission on WindRunner. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39690182