In my mind I have images of sail like blades. Would they not catch more wind if they were wider?
In: Engineering
A wider blade is significantly heavier and won’t catch that much more energy, but a longer one will.
A blade that’s 10% thicker will catch more wind, maybe 10% but also weighs at least 10% more and won’t necessarily give you 10% more power. Most of the energy capture is from the tips of the blades which capture wind from the largest area and can turn a given force from the wind into a much larger torque
If you instead use that 10% weight increase to have longer blades they’ll be a bit over 10% longer and capture a bit over 21% more wind(its the area of the disc, not just the length) so the goal is pretty much always to have longggg skinny lightweight blades so you can capture as large of a disc of wind as possible with the least material
Latest Answers