Single-bladed floating wind turbine promises half the cost, more power | Hacker News Reader

Single-bladed floating wind turbine promises half the cost, more power

newatlas.com

125 pointsbelter29 comments

Very cool idea. It is similar to an auto gyro copter, causing the rotor to pull the tower instead of a traditional wind turbine where it is pushing it sideways. This is way more efficient. If winds get high the rotor pulls the construction upright, causing the plane of the rotor to be horizontal, which reduces its wind capture area and speed.

Totally, it uses the materials in a much more efficient way, we can get way more turbines per unit of steel, etc.

Should be interesting to see how these work in the combination of wave action, high wind speed, and high rotor tip speed. Seems like the rotor blades would be under flexing action from passing waves. Cool idea, and reduces the classic killer of windmills: heat from friction in high winds.

That blade makes me nervous if low wind speed and large waves is a combination that ever happens.

It would be interesting to watch one as wind speed increases, it’s a neat design.

Addressed at 32 seconds in the video here: https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/this-tilting-one-blader-fl...

Addressed how? All I see is a demonstration of tilting up in high winds. The worry here is low winds and high waves.

Or did you mean the "watch one" part is addressed? Sort of, but it's just a video of a render.

> The worry here is low winds and high waves.

Do you mean that the barely-rotating blade would dip into the oncoming wave-front and get snapped?

I imagine that depends on whether "waves without wind" are likely to occur, and whether we can expect waves sizes/shaped so that they clip the blade itself before their rising edge hits the buoy to bump the blade upwards.

Or hits anything that might be passing by, like a boat.

As with lighthouses, I'm pretty sure that would be the boat's fault for recklessly approaching anywhere that close to the giant well-marked stationary field of tethered obstacles in the first place.

If it's someone doing authorized maintenance, they will probably have a rule "do not approach from the blade-side." If the wind is changing that strongly and unpredictably, then it's already a dangerously bad time to do maintenance.

I find the images more informative than the video: https://newatlas.com/energy/touchwind-floating-wind-turbine/...

As for low wind and high choppy waves, is that possible? My naive understanding is that these come during storms where it is typically windy

Waves can travel a long way from a storm, but they wont be very choppy without wind no.

> I find the images more informative than the video

Said no one ever

Sort of novel idea on a Tjasker windmill. I will be surprised if this ever makes it out of the idea stage though.

Original non-blogspam:

https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/this-tilting-one-blader-fl...

That link has far less information on the design and function of the wind turbine, compared to the OP.

Looks sensible! Seems like it would need an underwater rotating connector for the power, given it swings with the wind? I'm sure it's doable but seems like an engineering challenge.

It seems it needs a rotating connector, but I don’t think in needs to be under the water. I would place that thing above water, inside the turbine.

cheap energy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWa21NSQsJw

What happens when the wind exceeds 70km/hr?

It’s literally explained in the article what happens at almost 4x the speed you mention.

Is it? I can only find this:

> [...] this one is rated for speeds as high as 70 m/sec (252 km/h / 157 mph).

And the question was what happens above this 70m/sec. A Taifun might go above 83 m/s.

Do you mean 70m/s?

My guess is that power generation would be greatly reduced or constant after that. It can also be that the whole thing breaks apart, and therefore needs to be stowed in those conditions (we are talking about category five hurricane)

Sorry I meant 70 m/sec. Current designs feather the blades and stop spinning when they exceed their maximum safe wind speed. The article says that this design can handle a much higher safe maximum wind speed, but there must still be a limit, and what then? If I understand correctly they can not feather the blade to stop.

It seems an obvious question so they've probably got a good answer, but I couldn't find it in the article.

I am an environmentalist, I prefer nuclear.

Even Don Quixote knew when to pick his battles...

There are hundreds if not thousands of nuclear plants, it's not like it's an unsolved problem to build a nuclear plant

Building them quicker and cheaper without compromising safety is an unsolved problem though.

You prefer increased cost over decreased cost?

We can walk and chew gum ya know?

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