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
It’s not. There’s a bunch of things going on here, but a propeller is significantly more efficient than other ways of creating thrust. That’s why wind turbines look like giant propellers.
A turbine does not create thrust (“wind force” in your question). But definition, a turbine takes energy *out* of a moving fluid. Things that make thrust are putting energy *in* to the fluid. We call those propellers or fans; there’s no rigorous definition difference, although in aviation “propeller” means “thing without a shroud” and “fan” means “thing with a shroud.”
*If* you don’t have a speed constraint, a propeller is the most efficient way to add energy to a fluid. That’s why small aircraft, commercial turboprops, and boats all use propellers. They don’t go fast enough to run into the speed problem. Commercial & military jets, however, go so fast that the efficiency of propellers drops way off because they start getting near supersonic speeds. That’s why they use fans instead.
You have to be going a couple of hundred miles an hour, at least, before this becomes an issue. Since that “never” happens with wind turbines, they also don’t have to deal with the speed issue and they use a design that looks a lot like propeller. It’s a turbine, not a propeller, because it’s taking energy *out* of the fluid.
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