SmartEnergy Designline Blog
How about hydraulic wind turbines?
Bill Schweber
5/15/2010 12:00 PM EDT
A recent article in Machine Design discussed an interesting alternative approach. The article, "Hydraulic Wind Turbines?", explained and discussed having the blades turn a hydraulic pump in the nacelle, and have the pumped fluid then drive a generator at the base.
The author pointed out that this is a tried-and-true approach, and with significant industry engineering experience, but on a smaller scale. In fact, the best thing about the article was that it presented the pros and cons of the hydraulic design in terms of cost, efficiency, scaling, and other factors. It did not say that this approach is always or even usually better, only that it might be better in some circumstances and should be considered.
This is what engineering is really about: looking as objectively as possible at ways to solve a problem honestly admitting the unknowns of challenges, and recognizing that the standard, "conventional wisdom" solution may not be the right choice. It's all about the tradeoffs and priorities, not blindly implementing the common approach before considering if viable and better alternatives are available.♦
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j2p
5/20/2010 2:24 PM EDT
It's not "If", it,s loss and storage.
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green_is_now
6/3/2010 10:44 PM EDT
Now consider a wind turbine site near a salt cavern.
Use the salt cavern as a compressed air storage energy storage device.
Add a hybrid hydraulic-electric-aircompressor.
Any two can be connected or all three. when wind energy exceeds electrical demand, excess energy is used to compress air storage.
When low-no wind present air storage provides electrical base load demand.
Complex system ground based, tower and nacelle low cross section and weight-size-cost.
Cool stuff when do we get started building one?
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Work to Ride, RIde to Work
6/10/2010 10:23 AM EDT
Compressed air energy storage? Wow. Go back to your physics and thermodynamics classes but before you do, be sure to take of the green colored glasses. You can start building one when you find enough suckers, I mean investors to pay for it.
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green_is_now
6/11/2010 3:49 PM EDT
Add heat exchangers, turbo expanders, effiecency comes back up.
Large size offsets costs. Standardization on a few sizes also reduces costs.
Go to the thing called the web and look up salt dome and the time constants associated with its size. Note the load leveling capability of such a large volume.
"Waste heat from large dynamic input power being converted to compressed air can be recycled with heat exchanges into constant-near constant output for loads.
Air and oil hybrid can cahnge modes allowing for compressables to be "air blader" for oil.
Dream a little Mr. pessimism or go help clean up the oil disaster because people like you are keeping us now and in the past from becoming more energy independent We now are subsidizing terroism via oil purchases from terorist friendly countries, environmental disasters, and national economic drain (less value/$ ) due to trade deficits.
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