5 ms·
I presume the pitch is adjustable, so unless the mechanism fails you can just relax the pitch like pointing a sailboat directly into the wind to depower the sai
by pengaru 3y ago
I presume the pitch is adjustable, so unless the mechanism fails you can just relax the pitch like pointing a sailboat directly into the wind to depower the sails.
- bluGill 3y agoThe mechanism is designed (or at least should be designed) so that if anything breaks the blades rotate to the no power position. There is a lot of engineering and redundancy that i'm only partially aware of.
- pengaru 3y agoI guess the real question is how bad can conditions get before the "no power position" is still too much force for the structure to withstand. You can't escape the fact that the blades are a ton of surface area on a long lever... and if the winds are both forceful and directionally chaotic, there isn't really a "no power position" to be found. Going back to the sailboat metaphor, it's the conditions where you douse the sails entirely. At most flying a little storm jib. Pointing upwind is just to enable doing so.
- bluGill 3y agoThe tower catches more wind than the blades and will fail first. And the tower is built dor the force of strong winds with the blades resiting the wind. Though they are built in rural areas and at sea so even in the worst case disaster (manufacturing flaw, not wind) nobody is hurt.
- nuccy 3y agoEven if pitch is adjustable the problem is very non-trivial given the size of the blades and different wind speeds and directions on different elevations. Putting the blades in no-power position along the main wind direction, but having small sidewind 200m above the surface would rotate it.