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If the plane really is task built that would be super cool. Huge plane (108m/356ft), carrying pretty light cargo all in all (blades of this length weigh probabl
by jauntywundrkind 3y ago
If the plane really is task built that would be super cool. Huge plane (108m/356ft), carrying pretty light cargo all in all (blades of this length weigh probably 20~25T), that ideally can land and takeoff on short runways (to maximize the number of airports it can deliver to). By compare, a 777 will be either 60 or 75m long and carry 220t, and itself weigh 160t. Neat idea. Being able to get bigger blades to sites would be great. It also would enable centralizing the production better, which could be an efficiency win; a couple big factories cranking out blades. There's a lot of practical scale-out this would enable.
The plane really is pretty wildly proportioned. I'm not sure what the total internal volume/cross section is expected to be but that's a long plane! Carrying not much weight! The blades are big but not colossal: by compare, the offshore Vestas V164 10MW turbine has 160m blades (weighting 35t); this is being designed for ~100m.
It's definitely good to ask what else such a craft might be useful for. The low capacity is an obvious downside, but if it can access lots of airfields that could be quite enticing.
Edit: Missed this: With a capacity for 80 tons. That's a lot more than I expected! It doesn't seem to make sense to me, for the payload it'll carry.
Also: The WindRunner includes shoulder-height tires and has the ability to land on a packed-dirt 6,000-foot runway, which would need to be built for each project. Well, that's neat & potentially immensely useful for a lot.
- gnicholas 3y agoInterestingly the article mentions oil and gas as a potential alternate/additional customer.
- minitoar 3y agoThat makes sense. They need lots of weird long rig components.
- giarc 3y agoI think you would want to pack it with anything on the return trip to the factory to pick up more blades. Otherwise it's just an empty trip, might as well move some large equipment to help offset the cost.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- icegreentea2 3y agoTheir mockups show that they envision packing at least 2 blades into a single aircraft. I think that explains the 80t capacity.
- usrusr 3y ago> The blades are big but not colossal: by compare, the offshore Vestas V164 10MW turbine has 160m blades (weighting 35t); this is being designed for ~100m. That's the part I really struggle with: I could easily imagine value in taking a new approach to blade transport as radical as this if it allowed on-shore installations to get on par with off-shore rotor sizes. But if the result is the same as what's already established, just achieved in a different way, it feels like a microoptimization hardly worth the engineering.
- hoerensagen 3y ago160m is the rotor diameter not the radius.
- usrusr 3y agoThanks, missed that detail. So the plane, when it becomes available, would be almost long enough for blades deployed off-shore today. (e.g. Siemens-Gamesa SG 14, 108m and 115m)
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoWow, thanks for posting. That really shades what they're going for differently, much more ambitious than I'd first thought. So this will be bigger than 10MW that Vesta. Blades will almost certainly have to be >35t. For compare the largest turbine now is China's 16MW turbine (note that a couple m of the diameter is in the hub not the blades, but still): > Goldwind’s GWH252-16MW intelligent wind turbine has a rotor diameter of 252 meters (827 feet) https://electrek.co/2023/09/05/worlds-largest-wind-turbine-record-typhoon/ https://electrek.co/2023/09/05/worlds-largest-wind-turbine-r... And it supposedly even did product 16MW average across a day, once! Albeit ahhh, they ran it during a typhoon! > On September 1, the 16 MW wind turbine came up against wind speeds of a peak of 53mph in the face of Typhoon Haikui,*
- 7952 3y agoThe benefit is in opening up new sites that were previously not viable at all.
- 3y ago