An ancient design that’s caught wind
What are wind turbines?
There’s no way to avoid getting to the point as quickly as possible: the wind turbine is the modern cousin of the ancient windmill. Windmills have been a source of rotational energy, used by humanity, since antiquity. As most things are, the first ancient windmill was used by the ancient Greeks – designed and implemented by engineer and mathematician Heron of Alexandria.
Early windmills operated by using wind patterns to assist in rotating a series of blades, effectively converting a wind source into rotational energy. Over time, our ancestors used windmills to do everything from grinding grain and wheat, to assisting in land drainage and extracting groundwater. Suffice it to say, the design of a windmill – the sheer audacity required to come up with a machine that turns something as ubiquitous as the wind into a useable form of energy – is ingenious.
Modern wind turbines perform a similar function as their ancient cousins. However, modern needs echo modern design sensibilities; wind turbines use the wind to convert the kinetic rotational energy of the spinning blades into electrical energy that is pumped to an electrical grid.
How do wind turbines work?
From an engineering perspective, it’s inaccurate to classify wind turbines as turbines, as no such part is present in modern designs. Instead, it is more accurate to classify wind turbines as aero-foiled generators. For the sake of reason, and consistency, however, I will continue to refer to aero-foiled generators as wind turbines.
There are a multitude of wind turbines used, and they come in a variety of different shapes and sizes. However, all wind turbines can be classified as either horizontal axis or vertical axis types. The axis determines which direction the blades spin when encountering wind. The design that most people think of when they imagine a wind turbine is the horizontal axis design. The horizontal axis wind turbines feature a design that is reminiscent of the ancient windmills of the past, with three or four blades that spin like a fan.
How, then, do wind turbines work? Wind moves a turbine’s blades, and the spinning blades then spin a servomotor within the turbine’s encasing. This servomotor is connected to a generator, which produces the electrical energy that is eventually fed into an electrical grid. While most wind farms are connected to “The Grid,” wind turbines can be directly connected to a home’s own power grid, meaning that the proud owner of a wind farm can get energy without having to worry about paying a bill.
Why are wind turbines important?
Wind energy, or, rather, the wind itself, is a form of solar energy. Speaking on a broad scale, wind is the movement of gases. On Earth, the sun unevenly heats parts of our planet, resulting in gasses – what we call the air – moving about the atmosphere at varying rates. We call this gaseous movement “wind,” and it is very much a valid form of renewable energy.
Wind turbines are important for the same reason that all renewable forms of energy are important: they are unaffected by our consumption. Unlike fossil fuels or coal or even wood, which our species will consume to the point of extinction, solar energies like wind can be endlessly consumed in an environmentally friendly way.
What is the future of wind turbines?
Suffice it to say, renewable forms of energy represent the future of our species and our planet. Assuming that every environmentalist’s worst nightmares do not come to fruition, we will one day see a world powered by the very nature we have spent the past 200 years burning to cinders.
As always, I’m excited for the absurd possibilities. A Spanish company named Vortex Bladeless recently announced plans to start crowdfunding their design for a new kind of wind turbine. Their design is completely bladeless; instead of spinning, their wind turbines oscillate in the wind to produce the necessary kinetic energy for the electrical conversion. The design is undeniably radical, but it is precisely the kind of ingenuity that we need to work on bettering our planet.