Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
tower, the W-34, as it was called, served as inspiration for many
commercial applications that came to life eventually. Hütter
defined an approach to wind turbine development that lasted
for decades: Designing wind turbines on the basis of aerospace
know-how. This approach seemed to be practical for his
developments as well as for many of the federal research projects
of the 1970s and 1980s.
Especially in the United States, the aerospace approach was
practiced intensively. Hütter's W-34 found successors in the federal
MOD-0 research turbines. In the 1980s American manufacturers
like ESI or Carter produced thousands of two-bladed downwind
turbines that strongly followed the W-34. In Germany federal
projects like WEC 520 or GROWIAN, all incorporated what Hütter
did first.
However, it should be noticed that the aerospace approach
failed right away. All wind turbines, be it federal projects or
commercial applications, sufered massive technical problems
or ended up in a total disaster for one particular reason: It is not
possible to transfer know-how from aerospace designs onto wind
turbine designs. The technical and physical diferences were too
big. One of the biggest lessons learned in wind turbine technology
was that wind turbines need their own specific designs based
on appropriate, intensive long-term research.
A second more successful Hütter development found its
way to commercial production transferred
Tvind. In the mid-
1970s, the famous Tvind international school started getting
experience in blade manufacturing. They decided to use a blade root
designed and applied by Ulrich Hütter in the 1950s. The blades of
Tvind's first 15 kW experimental machine incorporated this root
construction.
Some Danish blade manufacturers (Økær and Alternegy)
continued using that blade root system. In detail the root system
consisted of rovings that came from the inner blade root, revolved
around the bushings and went back to the blade root. Several
thousands of blades using the original and an advanced version
of the Hütter root were produced in the 1980s. After the 1980s
biggest blade manufacturer, Alternegy, went bankrupt there was
no other blade or wind turbine producer who continued using
via
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