If a turbine is more efficient than a propeller for planes producing wind force, why isn’t it used for wind energy the other way around?
In: Engineering
A turbine will extract more energy from the air you ram though it
It will also bring a lot more stress into the system and require *everything* to be stronger/heavier/expensive
Engineering is all about optimizing competing goals.
A wind turbine needs to capture energy from the wind, but it needs to do this cost effectively, that means no exotic materials or insane structural requirements.
If you force the wind through a turbine you’ll extract more power from it but also put a much large load on the tower as it effectively brings a big swath of air to a dead stop. Long propeller like blades do a decent job of extracting energy from the wind without putting much side load on the tower.
Turbines are also effective mainly when spinning very quickly, and for lower speed operations a propeller with a few blades often ends up being more efficient.
We’re not trying to build a wind turbine that can extract *all* the energy from the wind, we’re building a wind turbine that can extract energy from the wind *while balancing competing goals* so you get one thats kinda good but also kinda cheap and kinda fast to design rather than one that’s extremely good but also expensive and slow to design/build.
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