Imagine something as tall as New York's Chrysler building, but spinning. China's Mingyang Smart Energy has announced plans for a colossal 22-megawatt offshore wind turbine, and standing in its presence will be an unprecedented human experience.
The feats of engineering in offshore wind are becoming almost comical in scale, for a simple reason: the amount of energy you can extract from a turbine depends mostly on its swept area. The bigger that swept circle gets, the more energy you can harvest – but also, the greater the bonus becomes for adding more length.
Put it this way: if your turbine has a 20-meter (85.6-ft) diameter, and you add one further meter (3.3 ft) to that diameter, you gain somewhere around 34 square meters (366 sq ft) of additional swept area. But if your turbine starts with a 50-m (164 ft) diameter, adding one extra meter of diameter brings in about 79 extra square meters (850 sq ft) of swept area, since that extra blade length is sweeping a bigger circle.
What's more, these huge offshore turbines are extremely expensive to install, and the economics of deployment and grid connection tend to work in favor of fewer, larger turbines than more, smaller ones.
Thus, the sheer size of these things is getting absolutely nutty. The H260-18MW turbine currently under construction by CSSC uses 128-m-long (420-ft) long blades for a ridiculous 260-m (853-ft) diameter and a 53,000-sq-m (570,490-sq-ft) swept area. That's 9.9 NFL football fields or 42.4 Olympic swimming pools when converted to standard journalistic units – ignoring the small area left unswept by its hub.
MingYang's own typhoon-proof MYSE 18.X-28X, pictured above, will use 140-m (459-ft) blades for a swept area of 66,052 sq m (711,000 sq ft, 12.3 NFL fields, 52.8 Olympic swimming pools) – again, minus the hub area.
The new turbine proposed for 2025 by MingYang, according to Bloomberg, will have a peak output of 22 MW, and a rotor diameter over 310 m (1,017 ft), corresponding to a swept area of at least 75,477 sq m (812,425 sq ft, 14.1 NFL football fields, 60 olympic swimming pools), minus hub.
Add on a little clearance to make sure the blade tips stay out of the water, and you'll probably be looking at something taller than New York's 319-m (1,047-ft), 77-story Chrysler Tower, or the 324-m (1,063-ft) Eiffel Tower in Paris – but spinning. I don't have an imagination capable of picturing just how awe-inspiring a machine like this would be at close range.
Indeed, these will be some of the largest moving parts ever built. Can you think of anything else with visible moving parts this big? Nothing in the mining mega-machine category comes close, and while the 27-km (16.6-mile) circumference of the Large Hadron Collider holds the title of the world's largest machine overall, it's hidden underground, and particle acceleration isn't exactly a spectator sport.
So taking a boat ride past these mammoth offshore wind turbines will be pretty much an unprecedented human experience. It'll be breathtaking. Sign me up!
Source: Bloomberg
+
Just wot is the max' rpm of this offering of mssrs Ying Tong Iddle Eye Po & Co to be?
[After using me best slide rule, the backs of 3 fag*-packets + taking both me socks off to back-check,
mi thinks the rotor tips are going to go through the sound barrier / v close to even at low rpm]
* POI: For our western colonial readers - No relation.
If one of the three blades is pointing straight up or one of the three blades is pointing straight down as it turns, isn't the blade putting huge uneven wobbling forces on the hub as it turns. Also shouldn't the entire device be higher so that all the blades ca get maximum power from the wind?
I dont think it will have an impact at all. There are many mountains on earth, these turbines are much shorter than the countless of mountains scaterred on earth.
Think of them as mini hills, the planet's weather system will probably not notice them there at all.
Who ever believes that nuclear energy is safe wants to go to Chernobyl or Fukishima for a holiday.
During the World War our country Australia had a hydrogen generator factory located right here in our city. The gas-works (as it was known) created hydrogen gas by dropping fine water droplets onto super heated charcoal to form steam. The steam vapour was passed through a special membrane filter which separated the hydrogen an oxygen. All generated from tree burnt wood. The hydrogen gas was then used to run the hydrogen burning pumps in the gas-works, which transfered the excess hydrogen gas throughout the entire city's underground gas pipes.
The whole gas-works was self running.
Conclusion: We don't need unclean nuclear plants for anything what so every. Nor do we need electrolysis to separate water into hydrogen. On other social sites people commented and and said that radiation is a necessary cure for cancer. Putting radiation into medical procedures is fools folly. The pharmaceutical and medical profession should go to prison for such in humane practices.
Further more, some scientists need to pull their head out of their backsides,and take a trip to either of the earths polar caps and measure the nuclear bomb radiation caused from the detonation of nuclear bombs during the 60's. In their endocrinated wisdom they may find the cause of global warming effects caused by extra man made radiation with the sun light angle of incidence effecting the polar absorption from the sun, which is causing the warming of the polar regions. Pons and Fleischmann
demonstrate clearly that the heavy radio active element deuterium in sea water causes excess energy in sea water to create excess heat. Man made Nuclear bombs effect the deuterium activity in sea water, along with sun light creating warming bands around the globe. Todate there have been 2000 registered nuclear detonations around the globe.
Climate change is man made from nuclear stupidity. Do we need more of it...?