*Awesome* title. Now *that's* a title that cause you to click! :-)
I'm wondering how they knew that turbine was going to fail, in enough time to set up a camera to watch it. Did they just know that a storm of that magnitude would cause the turbine to fail, and they mounted a camera to watch it until they did? If so, why didn't they, knowing said turbine was in risk of failure, do something about it? I mean, someone must have, in the long history of wind turbines, figured out an appropriate design contingency for a hurricane force wind that would preserve the turbine. (For example, in the event of winds over X (as measured by rotations of the turbine over Y RPM) the blades could be allowed to rotate freely on their long axis, such that they end up parallel and "sailing" into the wind, and thus not producing effective rotation).
I think this might have been a test. At the end of the clip, YouTube gives you a choice to watch several other clips related to wind turbine or wind mill. A few of those are different shots of this turbine failing. One has voices communicating to each other. I don't recognize the language. They're too calm in tone for this to be anything but a test where they were expecting this very result.
It's Danish, apparently. But I read it as them knowing what was coming, rather than them orchestrating this.
For one thing, it'd be one hella expensive test -- such a turbine costs a number of millions of currency units, and it is utterly destroyed. If it were a test, there'd be lots and lots of cameras and 5 dozen people in a bunker watching it.
One of the clips linked to on googletube explains that this was in Aarhus, Denmark, and involved failure of the safety mechanisms, known far enough in advance for an evacuation to be set up (not that it looks like a 400 meter radius is more than 2 maintenance technicians and a cow).
Normally windmills are put on the parking brake and furled (blade pitch adjusted) for heavy winds. They don't typically explode like that with any heavy storm. Presumably it was the furling mechanism that broke on this windmill, and the parking brake wasn't able to stop the turbine from turning when the blades were still in action.
By the way, this looks like a fairly smallish turbine, as such things go. Maybe blade length 20, 30 meters. They go bigger.
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Date: 2008-02-29 05:44 am (UTC)I'm wondering how they knew that turbine was going to fail, in enough time to set up a camera to watch it. Did they just know that a storm of that magnitude would cause the turbine to fail, and they mounted a camera to watch it until they did? If so, why didn't they, knowing said turbine was in risk of failure, do something about it? I mean, someone must have, in the long history of wind turbines, figured out an appropriate design contingency for a hurricane force wind that would preserve the turbine. (For example, in the event of winds over X (as measured by rotations of the turbine over Y RPM) the blades could be allowed to rotate freely on their long axis, such that they end up parallel and "sailing" into the wind, and thus not producing effective rotation).
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Date: 2008-02-29 11:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-01 09:12 pm (UTC)For one thing, it'd be one hella expensive test -- such a turbine costs a number of millions of currency units, and it is utterly destroyed. If it were a test, there'd be lots and lots of cameras and 5 dozen people in a bunker watching it.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-01 09:09 pm (UTC)Normally windmills are put on the parking brake and furled (blade pitch adjusted) for heavy winds. They don't typically explode like that with any heavy storm. Presumably it was the furling mechanism that broke on this windmill, and the parking brake wasn't able to stop the turbine from turning when the blades were still in action.
By the way, this looks like a fairly smallish turbine, as such things go. Maybe blade length 20, 30 meters. They go bigger.