> The objective of the present work is to determine the exact integrals for thrust and bending moment coefficients, serving as an addendum to Glauert's original work deriving optimum power coefficients.
I don't think any "wind energy possibilities" were expanded. It looks like the student author gave an elegant exact/analytic computation of measurements that are already computable numerically. Remember that all analytic results are always only "Platonic ideal" approximations of real-world engineering results. It's possible, though not at all mentioned in the paper, that these exact solutions might make engineering computations easier.
As always, the tell is that claims made about the paper, but not in the paper are not to be relied upon. Nowhere does the paper claim to measure any quantiative improvement in rotor performance, not even theoretically potential improvements.
> “Improving the power coefficient of a large wind turbine by just 1% has significant impacts on the energy production of a turbine, and that translates towards the other coefficients that we derived relations for,” she said. "A 1% improvement in power coefficient could notably increase a turbine’s energy output, potentially powering an entire neighborhood."
This reminds me of the old story about being able to capture just 1% of a market to create a successful startup and how you always have to remember, there are numbers less than 1.
OP claims this was not written in the paper because it was speculative, not quantitative. Nowhere in the paper did she ever claim to have made an x% improvement over the original work. Not making such claim in the paper itself is a testimony on how the scientific method should be applied. Of course anyone would hope to make a difference in the world, of wind turbine blades, and her comment does just that.
Its just classic HN reductionalism to reduce certain unverifiable claims down to its core principle.
some more equally valid remarks:
"Moving wind turbines just 50km closer to power consumers would decrease transmission loss by .5%"
"Building 102 wind turbines would be a 2% increase over the planned 100"
This is exactly the type of content I love to hate on HN
She found a 1% increase in turbine blade efficiency, with a pencil, and her brain, in her
"spare" time.
Not just turbine blade, but any airofoil that is spinning.
And no one finds 1%, all at once anymore, or that was the conventional thinking, with the 1% or better days, long long gone, but here it is.
I love that she did that, but I really get annoyed by college PR departments reaching for practical applications for anything cool done in math. IMO refining a 100 year old problem is good enough for a press release!
Will it make wind energy net positive? Search for photos of the amount of concrete and rebar needed to install a tower. Coupled with manufacturing, transport, maintenance, and end-of-life, they are always net negative.
The metric you're looking for is called Energy Return on Energy Invested, or EROEI -- how many units of energy do you need to put into all that concrete, rebar, and transportation in order to stand up the turbine vs. how many units of energy do you get out of the turbine over its lifetime.
Those who have studied it found that wind is around 4-20. Solar PV is something like 8-30. A Saudi oil well is in the 40's IIRC, and a fracking well is in the low single digits. In the US, we don't have saudi oil wells (and some would say the saudi's haven't had a proper saudi oil well since the early 2000's...), so given the options left on the table and stopping short of some materials breakthroughs that need to happen to make thorium work, wind is pretty competitive relative to what we have left here at the bottom of the metaphorical energy barrel.
Now, if we're just trying to be wowed by looking at construction photos, we can also look at photos of the miles of pipework needed in the acres of an oil refinery, but that's not really going to tell us anything about the actual numbers either...
I think a lot of EROEI calculations have clearly refuted this.
Summary: Wind power contributes significantly to scenarios where EROI remains above the "net energy cliff" (typically around 10). While exact EROI values for wind alone aren’t isolated in the paper, the system-level EROI for high-renewable scenarios (including wind) ranges from 10 to over 20, depending on factors like transition speed and enabling technologies (e.g., storage or grid upgrades). Wind’s individual EROI is implied to be high and competitive, aligning with earlier studies showing operational wind EROI values of 19-30+.
However compared to gas turbines, wind is cheaper. How can I assert this? because in the UK electricity prices are benchmarked against gas. (for various reasons)
Even offshore wind is cheap.
In the US its probably even cheaper as roads are bigger and straighter, and planning is not nearly as onerous.
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