Wind Turbine Blades

While one can attain highly attractive wind turbine tax credits and incentives, the most important part is to look for the right kind of wind energy system with excellent design of wind turbine blades that will garner enough energy to fulfill your residential needs for power.

Along with efficiency, you will also look for durability, productivity and cost effectiveness of advanced wind turbine blades.

The basic idea is to look for properly designed wind turbine blades that are durable, lightweight and which have been designed specially to be used in suburban residential areas.

Prominent scientists and wind energy experts have criticized the idea of a single smaller or medium sized windmill for every American household. Rather, they promote the idea of medium or big size wind farms that can support the energy requirements of village-sized society. And yes, wind farms do have a place in our society, especially the part of the Midwest U. S. called the Saudi Arabia of Wind.

However, residential wind turbines also have their place in the marketplace so that consumers can empower themselves in places that have enough wind to do so. As a result, small companies are developing suitable wind turbine blades designed with perfect aerodynamics that may help them to spin fast enough to create the required power even if winds are light.

The idea is to offer an efficient wind turbine system for many North American homes so that they may generate enough electricity to fulfill their needs. However, there are many hurdles that make it difficult for designing specific wind turbine blades that may move enough even in light winds.

Advanced wind turbine blades are made of composite material that offers a lightweight and durable system. Composite wind turbine blades allow designers to increase the length of turbine blades by three times of that of normal blades. Being lightweight, these blades get more spin even in light winds. Some wind turbine blades not only spin fast, but they use such aerodynamics that increases the effect of light air on them.

Engineers and designers take into account such elements as rotor diameter, tip speed ratio, number of blades, angle of attack and lift coefficient. The rotor diameter and number of blades needs to be determined from the get-go when designing either a small or industrial scale turbine. Most industrial scale turbines have two or three blades.

The tip speed ratio means simply how much faster the tip of the wind turbine blades are as compared to the wind speed. The angle of attack is measured in degrees and uses the same principles of lift as does an airplane wing. The angle of attack is usually between one and 15 degrees.

The lift coefficient is two times PI (3.14159 etc. if you remember your math from school) times the angle of attack. Just like an airplane wing a wind turbine blade can also stall if there isn’t enough lift on the blades.

One of the major debates about design of wind turbine blades is about the issue of making and using vertical blades or horizontal. While current practices suggest that horizontal wind turbine blades provide better efficiency with safety, there is ample amount of evidence that suggest that vertical wind turbine blades may serve more optimally in some situations.

The main hurdle in implementing plans for using renewable energy resources such as solar energy panels and wind energy turbines is the fact that our cities, villages and suburbs are not designed to promote usage of renewable energy resources. The buildings in our cities were designed in that period when people failed to realize the importance of renewable energy resources.

As a result, most of our picturesque buildings in large cities are more about aesthetics and less about using wind energy to its fullest. This is why wind farms outside of major cities would be an advantage while homes outside of large cities could take advantage of residential wind turbines for home energy use.