Wind Power: Is the Fuselage Turbine a Better Design?
A fresh look at wind turbine design. Betz’ Law implies that if a device could be added to a wind turbine which lowers back pressure, the wind mill would be able to extract more than 59{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the available wind power.
INTRODUCTION
The following email from John O’Sullivan prompted a discussion between the recipients which partly focused on wind turbine design features:
“Nick, Bob, Geraint,
Senior PSI colleagues are wondering if you three gents have been in contact and discussed your respective ideas. We are especially interested in how you all pursue a pragmatic, engineering‑focused mindset and value greatly practical experimentation. Geraint has recently submitted a novel idea for an experiment to disprove the GHE and would welcome help with that. If you can join forces for mutual benefit that would be terrific.”
Robert Beatty:
“As a mining engineer, I have had some exposure to turbines/ exhaust fans and have been wondering why the existing numerous wind turbines (WT) seem to suffer so many inherent design limitations. (Apart from why we need them at all.) My concerns include no power generated during high winds or low winds. The high ratio gear box. No auto pointing facility. The enormous swinging blade system. Vulnerability to icing. Bird strike. No preconditioning of the incoming air. My proposed design alternative to mitigate these problems is at http://www.bosmin.com/turbine/bturbine.pdf ”
Nick Schroeder:
“Every time those enormous blades pass the tower they are subject to a huge blade passing pulse. Need some beefy gear boxes/gear teeth to take that cyclical punishment. I found it interesting that the blades face the oncoming wind, the wind doesn’t come across the nacelle first. Suppose there was much wind tunnel testing to decide this.”
Robert Beatty: “I wonder if this explains where the ultra-low frequency noise pollution comes from?”
Nick Schroeder:
“Quite easy to calculate: number of blades & rpm.
I worked start up at a large USC design coal fired power plant outside Pueblo, CO. You could Google map it. Had both wet cooling tower and air cooled condenser. When they started the plant there was a very loud noise that bothered the nearby community. There were two very large axial flow induced draft fans just upstream of the stack. I calculated the blade passing frequency for the fans and came close to the frequency of the sound. They installed baffled silencers in the stack to stifle the noise. Of course that changed pressure drop and flow/horsepower/auxiliary power.”
Robert Beatty:
“I guess the other consideration is the hollow mast. This unit is mounted on a very large lump of concrete in the ground. If the blade gets the tremors as it passes the mast, why would not the mast also operate like a very long and low frequency tuned organ pipe? Should be easy to check with an internal sensor.”
TECHNICAL CONSIDERATIONS
This YouTube presentation shows flexing apparent in both the WT mast and blade structure during high wind conditions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDuhqXLYjdk
A typical WT unit[1] has three blades and rotates at speeds from 15 to 20 rotations per minute, giving a frequency impact on the tower of 45 to 60 cycles per minute, or 0.75 to 1.0 Hz. A common tower is a hollow construction and 65m high. This can be compared to a stopped pipe organ[2] where the resonant frequency is approximately equal to four times the internal length, or 260 Hz.
These are both very low frequencies to the left end of the Gravity Waves chart. The large concrete foundation can be expected to transmit this sound through the surrounding ground area.
FUSELAGE TURBINE (FT)
An alternative design is proposed to combat the identified short comings with the current design. These include installing a diffuser and a perforated nozzle either side of the generator housing as shown.
The perforated nozzle design is based on filed experiments which showed additional air can be drawn into the turbine as illustrated in Cotton Trace Wind Streams.
WIND TURBINE REPORT
The full report covering the WT proposal is available at http://www.bosmin.com/turbine/bturbine.pdf
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine_design
[2] http://www.rwgiangiulio.com/math/pipelength.htm
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jerry krause
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Hi Bob and Nick,
What a wonderful example of what engineers do!!! They problem solve. They are technologists. They use the ideas which they have been taught and read about to improve things or to correct known problems. And in this case they share their knowledge and experiences.
Have a good day, Jerry
PS. But I did not read the words: harmonic oscillator (or oscillation) even though what you discussed seemed to me related to this general behavior (phenomenon?). Will get back to you after I read Bob’s references.
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jerry krause
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Hi PSI Readers,
If you go to http://www.bosmin.com/turbine/bturbine.pdf, you will find that Bob reports his actual experiments (not thought experiments) much like those conducted by the Wright Bros after they discovered that the previous data for a wing foil design was not valid.
Now the following comment is not to be critical of Bob, but it is to illustrate the difference between technologists and scientists which is often not recognized. Bob described the effect of moving the nozzle away from the turbine and diffuser as seen the Cotton Trace Wind Streams, but he never explained how it was that the ‘outside air’ was pulled into the air streams to increase the density of the atmosphere passing through the turbine.
It is the same Bernoulli Effect that allowed the Wright Bros. plane to fly. But whether or not Bob understood that the Bernoulli Effect was involved did not change what he observed by his experiments one little bit. That Bob, an engineer, actually experimented and scientists, actually experimented, to develop their important theories such as the Bernoulli Effect to explain what had been seen (observed) by putting cotton into the air stream so Bob could see the actual air stream instead of trying to imagine it.
What a wonderful example of the relationship between engineering and science!!!
Have a good day, Jerry
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jerry krause
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Hi Readers of PSI,
I have from time to time been accused of rambling on about topics which are related to the posting and/or other comments. My words have been judged to be puzzling to the reader.
Hence, I consider the possibility that some might be questioning the importance of the Bernoulli Effect, which I have introduced, relative to Bob’s posting and to the objective of PSI (GHE and AGW). To which I consider the topics of weather and climate to be related.
Meteorology (atmospheric science) is an infant science. R.C. Sutcliffe, in his 1966 book (Weather and Climate), reviewed this when he wrote (pp 17): “When it became firmly established from observations on mountains and in manned and free balloons that the air became steadily colder as the altitude increased, scientists were very ready to generalize and to assume that the cooling went on indefinitely to the limit of the atmosphere. This was the general belief until in 1899 the Frenchman Teisserene de Bort, announced to an astonished and even incredulous world that his sounding balloons had reached heights above which the temperature decreased no further.”
Later, pp 100, he wrote: “Again making a generalization, it is noticed that the contour gradient, and the wind speed which is closely related, increases upwards and reaches a maximum near the tropopause which is found not far from 300 mb (30,000 feet) in middle latitudes although much higher, near 100 mb (55,000 feet), in the tropics. With further height above the tropopause the winds usually decrease in strength. The circumpolar west wind vortex also tends to reach its greatest strength somewhere in middle latitudes and combining the two together, the variation with height and the variation with latitude, a core of maximum westerly wind strength is to be found somewhere in middle latitudes and near the tropopause. The maximum can generally be traced all around the earth, more or less continuously, and is known as the jet stream. It is a good graphical name coined in the United States in 1946 or thereabouts when this feature of world winds was first inferred but it is not a very good name if it leads people to think that there is a special kind of current called a jet stream which exists independently in the upper air. The jet stream is the central core of the circumpolar westerly winds, where the speed often exceeds 100 knots and sometimes 200 knots, and it is sometimes a remarkably sharp maximum with the speed falling away to half the strength within 200 or 300 miles, but it is the centre of a broad stream, so to speak, not a local current.”
I expect most readers of PSI are now familiar with the importance of jet streams and maybe they could learn more general, but specific, information about them by reading what Sutcliffe continued to write about them. But they will not find Sutcliffe proposes (or reviews) a possible mechanism by which some jet streams (known to exist for less than a century) are formed if they do not exist independently in the upper air. Nor will such a reader find that Sutcliffe proposes (or reviews) a mechanism by which these jet streams near the tropopause influence the weather which occurs at the earth’s surface.
But he does write (pp 139): “All this may seem a far cry from the general circulation of the world’s atmosphere but the detail serves to point the moral, that one cannot explain the broad features of world climate if one does not know the actual mechanisms involved.”
Because I do not want to leave a reader puzzled about the information I have reviewed, I ask the question: Could the jet stream produce a Bernoulli Effect upon the atmosphere at its boundary?
Have a good day, Jerry
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jerry krause
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Hi Readers of PSI,
For those interested in learning about a possible mechanism which involves the jet stream and the Bernoulli Effect, you can go to the essay Atmospheric Heat Engines–Global Atmospheric Circulation (http://principia-scientific.org/atmospheric-heat-engines-global-atmospheric-circulation/).
Have a good day, Jerry
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jerry krause
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Hi Readers of PSI,
Previously I had written: “But they [you the reader] will not find Sutcliffe proposes (or reviews) a possible mechanism by which some jet streams (known to exist for less than a century) are formed if they do not exist independently in the upper air.” So, if you are interested in reading where and how one jet stream might form, read the essay Chance Favors the Prepared Mind—Part 2 or Jet Streams (https://principia-scientific.com/chance-favors-the-prepared-mind-part-2-or-jet-streams/). And be sure to read the last comment at the end.
There are two factors which I have not reviewed. I have read the generalization that westerly winds (or currents) are convergent (maintain their identity) and easterly winds (or currents) are divergent (lose their identity). This is because of the spherical earth’s rotation and the resulting Coriolis Effect. And I have read that the jet stream is accelerated when its direction of motion is toward the northeast because of the action of the Conservation of Angular Momentum Law upon it. Also, what I have not reviewed is that the Plateau of Tibet is just north of the 30N latitude, that Kyoto, Japan is about 35N, and it seems most of the incendiary devices came down in United States north of the 40th latitude. Thus, these latitudes are consistent with a northwesterly motion if the jet streams originated over the Plateau of Tibet.
Have a good day, Jerry
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Claudius Denk
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Jerry:
Could the jet stream produce a Bernoulli Effect upon the atmosphere at its boundary?
JMcG:
Yes. It can and does. In fact, you can’t really understand the nature of atmospheric flow and storms without the Bernoulli effect. And that has to do with the fact that the best analogy for the nature of atmospheric flow and storms is that of a siphon.
To have a siphon you need a tube, and the walls of the tube must have a higher degree of resilience than the contents that flow through the tube.
When most people get to this point they give up. They give up because it seems impossible that there can be tubes in the atmosphere that channel this flow. They give up because they fall for the BS from the meteorological lobby that would have us believe that when we witness the tubular structure that is plainly apparent in tornadoes and hurricanes that we are only witnessing spinning air. They give up because they are sheepish and gullible.
Being neither, I championed on to discover that there is actually a hidden plasma phase of H2O that (literally) gets spun up on moist/dry windshear boundaries. This plasma phase can only emerge in the context of laminar flow and once it comes into existence if further facilitate flow by way of providing a slick internal surface and isolation from the friction of the greater atmosphere, allowing for the high wind speeds witnessed in jetstreams.
And, Jerry, the reason this plasma phase of H2O is unknown and undiscovered is because of a conceptual error made by your buddy Linus Pauling:
Pauling’s Omission
https://youtu.be/iIQSubWJeNg
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jerry krause
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Hi Claudius,
The difference between your and my ponderings is that I try not to introduce any unknown phenomena and you just did and in the process you had to find fault with a Nobel Prize Winning Chemist who continued to teach a introductory chemistry course and to write introductory chemistry textbooks in which he concluded that beginning college students could understand the concepts of quantum mechanics and use these concepts to better understand the chemistry which had only been observed by experiment and not fundamentally explained (understood).
Have a good day, Jerry
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Claudius Denk
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Well, unlike your position my position isn’t based on rhetoric, wishful thinking, or hero worship.
Unfortunately, Pauling failed to account for the QM effects of H bonds themselves. And so, Pauling’s error–what I call his omission–is very subtle and seemingly inconsequential. It is the ramifications of this simple error that are the problem.
The implications of Pauling’s Omission is that the current paradigms in much of the natural sciences are saddled with an artificially simplified understanding of H2O. This has resulted in a comedy of errors in the study of H2O that have graciously been labelled The Anomalies of H2O.
Did you realize that H2O currently has over 70 anomalies. Think about that. That’s 70 observations that are unpredicted by the current model. If that is not a clear indication that the theory is erroneous then I don’t know what is.
Here is a video that will explain to you how science actually works:
Chapter 2.1: Thomas Kuhn, normal science
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOGZEZ96ynI
James McGinn / Solving Tornadoes
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davejr
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Robert,
Thank you for your excellent work. As far as electrical generation, I’d like to offer an idea (or pondering at this point). I find it a shame that turbines need to pitch their blades or be turned out of the wind stream to avoid catastrophic failure at upper design speeds, forfeiting electric generation at the mills highest potential.
I envision an alternator piggy backed on a permanent magnet generator. Or in the FT case, the generator and alternator on opposite sides of, and providing bearings for the turbine. The alternator ‘free wheels’ up to the design speed, above which some of the generators output, varied by RPM, is sent to the alternators rectifier to create its field. The alternator is acting as a speed governor / brake while also contributing to total output during high wind speeds.
Thanks again,
David Meekhof
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Robert Beatty
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This sounds similar to an asynchronous generation system? The motor can be run up to synchronous speed either by the wind or by taking current from the supply. Thereafter, any tendency for the generator to “over speed” due to the wind, is automatically translated into electricity back into the supply chain. Importantly, the synchronous supply speed of the turbine is closely maintained which keeps the electrical frequency stable.
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Claudius Denk
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Hi Claudius,
The difference between your and my ponderings is that I try not to introduce any unknown phenomena and you just did and in the process you had to find fault with a Nobel Prize Winning Chemist who continued to teach a introductory chemistry course and to write introductory chemistry textbooks in which he concluded that beginning college students could understand the concepts of quantum mechanics and use these concepts to better understand the chemistry which had only been observed by experiment and not fundamentally explained (understood).
JMcG:
Actually, Jerry, for me it is just a matter of science. For you its a matter of belief. Belief serves a greater social function that makes believers blind to the shortcomings of their belief. Believers don’t confront contradictions because they literally don’t see them. Believers are only interested in acceptance within their peer group.
In previous posts I literally had to explain to you what is an anomaly of H2O. You had no idea!!! You don’t seek contradictions. You believe and like all believers you wallow in vagueness when presented with evidence that shows that your long held beliefs are false. All of the “slayers’ are believers. I doubt there is even one slayer that had the remotest awareness of the anomalies of H2O before (or after in most cases) I pointed it out.
Naively you slayers think that you are going to resolve this one issue thereby putting the train of the natural sciences back on track. The reality is that the train left the track a long time ago. And that had as much to do with Pauling’s Omission as it does anything else.
This is all a consequence of the democratization of science to the lowest common denominator of brain-dead science consumers to who for which science is their religion and the dumbed-down models their bread and butter of pretending to understand what they do not. And that is really what it comes down to your you Jerry. You are only cognizant of what fits your beliefs. Same is the case for all of you pretentious slayers.
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