
An Engineering Mistake That Made Wind Turbines Inefficient [video] - zerogvt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og2H7ZxkiMA
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dreamcompiler
Title is of course sensationalized, this being youtube. There have been many
"mistakes" in wind turbines that really count more as experiments we've
learned from: Vertical Axis Wind Turbines, high RPM/small diameter, and
generator-on-the-ground, to name three. This video is about leading edge
erosion, which is a problem actively being researched:

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032119305908)

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jacquesm
That's why there is such a thing as 'leading edge tape', 'prop tape' and more.
This is not a mistake but a simple fact of life for anything that rapidly
slices through the air, the point of first contact is where any contamination
in the air will hit your prop/wing/blade.

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carapace
Kind of a tangent...

Here in San Francisco they recent built a large condos-and-University-campus
neighborhood at the Eastern edge of the city. The thing is, the whole area is
subject to nearly constant high winds (blowing from the West, where you find
the Pacific Ocean.) All the trees that were planted for it are now bent over,
and there are some areas where it's hard to walk.

It blows my mind that the whole thing was planned out and built without regard
to this basic condition of the site.

In general, we have to start thinking out all the loops and side-effects of
our designs, or we wind up living in a constructed hell.

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bt848
Mission Bay really, really should not have had a linear street grid. Huge
mistake! Some days it's difficult to even stand on the street corners.

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carapace
Yes! Mission Bay, cheers!

What if they had built three-story buildings along the western edge to create
a standing wave in the wind large enough to "skip" the rest of the
development? Also, they could have shaped the whole place to guide and
concentrate the wind to banks of wind generators and defrayed some of their
energy costs, maybe.

We're so smart but we just don't pay enough attention and think deeply enough,
IMO. The folks that made Mission Bay are not dumb, the problem must be
something else.

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basicplus2
Leading Edge Errosion..

