Archive for February 12th, 2013

Credit: Johnson Systems, Inc.

We all have a mental image of wind mills, perhaps borne of romantic visions of the Netherlands, or being forced to read Don Quixote in high school. While modern wind turbines bear only cursory resemblance to the windmills of yore, they have a few things in common: they are tall and topped with shaped blades designed to catch the wind and turn, creating electricity (or, historically, grinding grain); and when one of the blades or part of the turbine mechanism became damaged, someone unlucky had to gather tools and start climbing.

Increasingly, the wind industry is becoming interested in what’s known as the vertical-axis wind turbine (VAWT), a unique looking piece of equipment on which the main rotor shaft is set vertically, with the blades wrapping around it, and the main components are located at the bottom, rather than the top, of the turbine. Read the rest of this entry »