why wind turbines have such skinny blades. Wouldn’t more surface area be more effective?
In: Engineering
long and slender wings are more efficient for most use cases where you don’t need high accelerations or low flight speeds.
this leads to similar solutions for airliners, sailplanes, long range drones, U-2s, and rotors of any kind.
for rotors there’s another limitation, and that’s adding too many blades leads to the blades disturbing each other. so engineers tend to go for a low number of blades for wind turbines (for helicopters there’s other considerations like maximum tip velocities and noise generation but that’s a we bit too much for ELI5 here).
two blades or even only one blade with a counterweight are sometimes projected, but in many cases 3 or more blades are easier to balance mechanically (again, some helicopters like original Hueys use 2 blade rotors but mainly for simplicity of design)
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