A wind turbine is a turbine powered by wind. An aerospace research institute in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, has developed a wind turbine that produces electricity at half the cost of conventional turbines. The new design produces as much electricity as a traditional wind turbine, but the blades are only half the diameter. Smaller blade sizes and other factors allow the new turbines to be packed closer together than traditional turbines, increasing the amount of electricity produced per acre.
Technical principles of wind turbines:
Normally, when wind passes through a wind turbine, almost half of the air is forced to stay around the blades instead of passing through them. Energy is lost. . Conventional wind turbines can only harness 59.3% of wind energy, a value known as the Betzlimit.
Wind turbines, designed for jet engine technologytion, overcome a fundamental flaw of conventional wind turbines. Wind turbines have shrouds placed around their blades to guide air through the blades and accelerate them, increasing energy production.
Wind turbines are like the air intake of a jet engine. When air enters, it first encounters a fixed set of blades, called a stator, which directs the air toward a set of rotating blades: the rotor. The air pushes against the rotor and comes out the other side, where it flows more slowly than outside the turbine. The screen is designed to direct relatively fast-moving air outward into the area behind the rotor. Fast-moving air accelerates slow-moving air, causing the area behind the turbine blades to become low pressure to attract more air past them.