In height, they have a 24m limit because it’s a common threshold in airports from which special studies must be done. Funny thing: The A380 was 24.1m (its other dimensions also required extra studies, let alone the catering difficulties related to its huge passenger count).
Maybe wind turbines will cause larger planes which will cause an A380 come back ;)
Here is my armchair engineering design. The blades are already wings so they get bolted on and become the wings of the plane and can rotate (or add canards if that's too hard). The engines are at the back.
But then how does it get back home? Attach some 70m blades as wings.
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.
Exactly. VTOL is also great as you can deliver the blades really close to construction location.
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?
Sadly, an LLM rejected my idea of building an enormous helicopter drone from wind turbine blades. They can't spin fast enough to generate sufficient lift.
seems silly to embrace the design of a plane that is made to move 2 static length blades when even longer blades have been shown to continue the trend of cheaper MW.
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.
This reminds me of an excellent series of lectures I once attended about how you can't have practical skyscrapers without inventing the elevator, you can't have practical automobiles without inventing the windshield wiper, and you can't have practical electric lighting without inventing a whole lot of power generation and distribution technology, or efficient vacuum pumps.
Every big invention depends on hundreds or thousands of other ones you don't hear as much about.
Sure, but it starts with the impractical version to kick off the other side.
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).
Before there was technology for power generation and distribution at scale, "you can use electricity to make light" was a mere curio. Fit to be showcased at fairs, but not something that could be put to practical use.
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.
> you can't have practical skyscrapers without inventing the elevator
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)
I live in China, and the only building I know that has more than six floors but no elevator is in Chongqing, because it has another walk-in entry in the middle. The vertical distance between the entry and the destination is still fewer than six floors.
They're giant single-piece layered composite structures. Crafting the blade onsite means you have to build then unbuild a giant plant next to each wind farm.
> Lundstrom says 3D-printed blades will never happen, since it would require a large, sophisticated manufacturing facility to be built at every wind farm.
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 big question is why not build the turbines offshore?
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.
I'm curious why they went with fixed-wing aircraft and not airships for this purpose. Wouldn't an airship work much better for delivering blades to e.g. the top of a mountain ridge? Or is the plan to fly the blades to the nearest flat area and then drive the rest of the way, without having to worry about tunnels and overpasses.
1) I was curious why they can't just attach two partial blades onsite to make a longer one, and the article makes some attempt to address it, so, to save you from reading the whole thing:
>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).
Finally the use case for the "airship renaissance" I've been hearing about for the last 25 years.
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.
What is the full lifecycle plan for the turbine? Is this special airplane to land in the same dirt field that's now a housing development? Are they only pairing these megaturbines with airfields? How exactly will a new blade arrive on-site in 2050?
Doing some pixel counting suggests a nacelle diameter of approximately 152 inches, which is close to the 155 inches of the A350's Trent XWB or the smaller of the various 777 engines (in particular, not the largest GE90).
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.
My grandfather in law used to love discussing the difficulties of transporting giant turbine blades. Always reminded me of the sheer difficulty with large solutions that are often not immediately obvious.
> During flight, the hold is only pressurized to about the level of the peak of Mt. Everest, to save energy.
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?
they shouldn't be flying very far, and thus won't even make it to 40k feet before heading down. If you are going more than 500 miles (i made that up but it is a good number to start with) build a new factory. Iowa has kept one factory busy for more than a decade transporting less distance than that.
70 meters is not actually the limit as this article suggests, I know the Duluth/Superior port receives 80 meter blades which are then trucked out and I think they plan on going bigger but don't recall the details. Saw some of the trucks hauling those 80 meter blades last year when I was there, it was impressive.
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.
50 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 68.8 ms ] threadA 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:
Maybe wind turbines will cause larger planes which will cause an A380 come back ;)
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?
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.
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 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).
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...
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)
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.
It's science and inventions all the way down ;-)
Sure, but remember that some wipers were "hand activated".
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.
>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).
I enjoyed the last submission on WindRunner. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39690182
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.
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.
"I'm having trouble moving my turbine blade" sounds like a First World problem !
"Yeah we hope to survive despite..."
Bad times.
> 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
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?
And just think. Once it arrives on site, you have a big ass grid storage battery to install!
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.