Intriguing, but I find this somewhat hard to believe.
Glu-lam isn’t new technology.
If you could achieve comparable strength: weight from timber as aluminium, GFRP, or CFRP, we’d see a high timber content in aircraft, instead of near zero.
If they’re making the blades heavier to compensate, you get all kinds of runaway knock on effects. Blades are heavier, so need to be stronger, so need to be heavier… tower, bearings, foundations, mountings etc all need to be stronger.
With the right wood you can achieve similar levels of strength/weight with wood as aluminum, but the volume is much bigger, so you often only see small aircraft made of wood. However, there are multiple issues of working with wood, the grain can significantly alter it’s properties, only very specific species can be used, requires pieces to be glued together in a very specific manner and the process of validating it for aircraft use is very complicated as well.
All of those would also apply to turbine blade construction, except aircraft certification. You still want all the strength on the outside to get the most strength out of the material used.
You still want really good validation because these will not be inspected like aircraft are. I’m not sure if anyone will actually be getting close up with the full length of the blade surface post installation.
Intriguing, but I find this somewhat hard to believe.
Glu-lam isn’t new technology.
If you could achieve comparable strength: weight from timber as aluminium, GFRP, or CFRP, we’d see a high timber content in aircraft, instead of near zero.
If they’re making the blades heavier to compensate, you get all kinds of runaway knock on effects. Blades are heavier, so need to be stronger, so need to be heavier… tower, bearings, foundations, mountings etc all need to be stronger.
Sort of an xkcd 808 argument.
With the right wood you can achieve similar levels of strength/weight with wood as aluminum, but the volume is much bigger, so you often only see small aircraft made of wood. However, there are multiple issues of working with wood, the grain can significantly alter it’s properties, only very specific species can be used, requires pieces to be glued together in a very specific manner and the process of validating it for aircraft use is very complicated as well.
Source: studied airspace engineering
All of those would also apply to turbine blade construction, except aircraft certification. You still want all the strength on the outside to get the most strength out of the material used.
You still want really good validation because these will not be inspected like aircraft are. I’m not sure if anyone will actually be getting close up with the full length of the blade surface post installation.