A brackish lake in South Holland, cut off from the sea by a dam, flat as a table.<\/p>\n
Something is floating on it that does not look like a wind turbine at all.<\/p>\n
The rotor is tipped back at an angle, closer to a helicopter disc than to the upright wheel on every tower inland.<\/p>\n
It is also small. The rotor measures about 19.7 feet across, and it makes roughly 12 kilowatts.<\/p>\n
That is a prototype<\/strong>, not a power plant<\/strong>.<\/p>\n A conventional machine meets rising wind by twisting its blades. Each blade sits in a bearing, a pitch motor turns it, and the blade spills lift it no longer wants.<\/p>\n Past a certain wind speed even that is not enough. The machine feathers, stops, and waits, which is why a gale is a loss and not a bonus.<\/p>\n This design does something else with the same problem. As the wind builds, the whole rotor tilts further toward horizontal.<\/p>\n A disc turned edge on to the flow catches less of it. The angle sheds load the way pitching sheds it, except that the moving part is the rotor as a unit rather than three blades in three bearings.<\/p>\n The claim attached to that is continuity. The maker says the arrangement holds stability and keeps producing in storms rather than parking.<\/p>\n Conventional turbines twist blades<\/strong>. This one leans back<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The rotor is a single piece. There are no separate blades bolted to a hub, no pitch bearings and no pitch drives, because there is nothing to pitch.<\/p>\n That removes a large share of the parts that fail on an offshore machine, and it removes the control system that manages them.<\/p>\n It also removes options. A one piece rotor cannot trim itself blade by blade, so everything the machine does about load it does with the tilt.<\/p>\n The blades were designed without bonding lines in the nose, which is where erosion usually starts on a leading edge, and built by vacuum infusion.<\/p>\n Ten blade sets were supplied for the test program, enough for several prototypes rather than one.<\/p>\n One piece, no bearings<\/strong>, and one control<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The turbine is not the experiment. The air behind it is.<\/p>\n The work runs under a project whose name is an argument in itself, standing for positive wake effects of turbines with tilted rotors.<\/p>\n A tilted disc should throw its wake downward and sideways rather than straight back at the machine behind it, which would let turbines stand closer together.<\/p>\n The same angle should also reach into faster air higher above the surface, since wind speed rises with height and a tilted rotor sweeps a taller slice.<\/p>\n Together those two effects are meant to raise power per square mile of sea, which is the number that decides whether a lease area pays.<\/p>\n The test is the wake<\/strong>, not the turbine<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The float is held by steel and polyester lines running to concrete deadweight anchors, which is ordinary practice for this kind of trial.<\/p>\n The anchors are not ordinary. Each carries 3D printed reef structures, put there so the concrete does more than sit still.<\/p>\n Load shackles are built into the mooring lines, recording the forces the platform actually puts into them rather than the forces a model predicted.<\/p>\n A meteorological mast stands alongside, and nine more identical units sit onshore nearby to give wake readings between machines.<\/p>\n Concrete on a seabed grows a community whether anyone plans it or not, which is what researchers found around pipe reefs<\/a> at a Dutch foundation.<\/p>\n The site, the anchors and the consortium behind the trial are described by a wind title<\/a>.<\/p>\n Anchors hold the float<\/strong> and feed the fish<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Twelve kilowatts is the honest number and it deserves to be said plainly.<\/p>\n The machines this concept is eventually pitched against turn rotors well over 700 feet across and are rated in the thousands of kilowatts.<\/p>\n Between those two sits every hard problem in offshore engineering, at a scale where a tilting rotor has to survive wave loading, salt and 20 years without the pitch system it deliberately gave up.<\/p>\n Testing on the lake runs through this year, funded by the Dutch national enterprise agency, with a consortium that includes a Japanese shipping group and two Dutch research institutes.<\/p>\n For scale, a single blade on a current offshore machine runs to 377 feet<\/a>, longer than this entire rotor by a factor of nineteen.<\/p>\n The rotor size, the rating and the one piece principle are stated by the developer<\/a>.<\/p>\n A floating wind prototype on a lake proves a principle, and the ocean asks a different question<\/strong> at a different size<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A brackish lake in South Holland, cut off from the sea by a dam, flat as a table. Something is floating on it that does not look like a wind turbine at all. The rotor is tipped back at an angle, closer to a helicopter disc than to the upright wheel on every tower inland. … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":37491,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"floating,wind,turbine","rank_math_title":"","rank_math_description":"A floating wind turbine with a tilted rotor is entering testing to determine how the design affects wake behavior and power output at offshore wind farms.","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37435"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38656,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37435\/revisions\/38656"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Why tilting further is the opposite of what a turbine normally does<\/h2>\n
What is actually floating out there<\/h2>\n
What the project is really trying to measure<\/h2>\n
What is bolted to the bottom of the lake<\/h2>\n
The distance between this and the thing it is aimed at<\/h2>\n