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plastics laboratory at DFVLR which he managed from 1968 to 1973.
Hütter and his team dedicated the following years mainly to basic
research on the field of composite materials.
Thirteen years later, Heiner Dörner set up the rotor blade as
“Kunstwerk am Bau” (art on a building) in front of the faculty at
Stuttgart to honour Hütter's achievements. Standing in front of the
five-storey campus building, this 17 m long blade today still impresses
people—not only by its size, but also because of its particular
aesthetics, its slender and elegant appearance. As a “warning energy
finger”, Dörner says, it also points towards the sparing handling of
natural resources. The shortage of oil at the beginning of the 1970s
was to be the trigger for the renaissance of wind energy.
Figure 17.8
Heiner Dörner and the W-34 blade in front of the building of
the Institute of Aircraft Design, University of Stuttgart, 1999
(Photo: Jan Oelker).
17.6
The Birth of GROWIAN
After a few years during which not much happened in wind energy
research Americans were the first to feel the energy crisis. Searching
for alternative energies they remembered Hütter's earlier works
on this field. Dörner, who since 1968 had been working as Hütter's
assistant at the Institute of Aircraft Design (IFB) in Stuttgart,
remembers that an inquiry from the US aerospace agency NASA to
buy Hütter's good old W-34 reached the institute in 1972.
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