World’s First All-Timber Wind Turbine Blades are Cheaper, Recyclable, Fire-Resistant and Stronger than Carbon Fiber
World’s First All-Timber Wind Turbine Blades are Cheaper, Recyclable, Fire-Resistant and Stronger than Carbon Fiber
Intriguing, but I find this somewhat hard to believe.
Glu-lam isn't new technology.
If you could achieve comparable strength: weight from timber as aluminium, GFRP, or CFRP, we'd see a high timber content in aircraft, instead of near zero.
If they're making the blades heavier to compensate, you get all kinds of runaway knock on effects. Blades are heavier, so need to be stronger, so need to be heavier... tower, bearings, foundations, mountings etc all need to be stronger.
Sort of an xkcd 808 argument.
With the right wood you can achieve similar levels of strength/weight with wood as aluminum, but the volume is much bigger, so you often only see small aircraft made of wood. However, there are multiple issues of working with wood, the grain can significantly alter it's properties, only very specific species can be used, requires pieces to be glued together in a very specific manner and the process of validating it for aircraft use is very complicated as well.
Source: studied airspace engineering
All of those would also apply to turbine blade construction, except aircraft certification. You still want all the strength on the outside to get the most strength out of the material used.
You still want really good validation because these will not be inspected like aircraft are. I'm not sure if anyone will actually be getting close up with the full length of the blade surface post installation.
Fire resistant? You know what can't catch fire? Wood.
Its also just a bunch of thin layers of wood glued together, so recyclable is also kinda bullshit. Stronger that carbon fiber is also questionable. Garbage article in general, it doesnt touch on any of these points.
20% cheaper is probably not good enough for more than 20% less performance output. A heavy blade can stand up, but be less responsive to wind force. They can still be recyclable by melting the glue/veneering, or just made into particle/OSB board.
I think wood can be pretty fire resistant.
i mean i could certainly see timber used in some capacity, it works in regular buildings after all, but i don't see how it would make sense in the blades..
They have been using wood for windmill blades for hundreds of years
They do make wind turbine towers out of wood in many places. Transportation advantages to it. Weight is non issue.
Mass is not a major issue for towers, but it's a big problem for rotating parts.
Explain to me how wood blades are fire resistant? That to me makes no sense.
Treated lumber is a thing, and in my experience it's harder to light than carbon fiber and resin.
My garage almost burned down once because I didn't notice sparks from my angle grinder were pooling on a CF/R panel, and it set off a couple other things (paper towel bar, shop towel, solvent residue close to the towel) while I ran to the extinguisher.
This "article" is just an ad, and shouldn't exist without actual journalism going on, but let's not pretend wood can't be fire resistant.
did you reply to the wrong comment? i specifically said that i don't think wood in the blades really makes sense
I wonder what the weight difference is.
So this "article" is just a regurgitation of a press release by the company making them. Cool. Cool, cool, cool.
Happens all the time:
https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-54-local-crime-reporting-as-police-stenography