dawnawakened:

The World’s Largest Wind Turbine Makes A Jumbo Jet Look Tiny

It’s called the Quantum Blade. And somehow, wind turbine manufacturer Siemens beat Gillette to the name. At nearly 250 feet long, the Quantum is the world’s largest wind turbine blade. It’s also the world’s largest fiberglass component to ever be cast in a single piece. And when installed on Siemens’ 6-megawatt wind turbine prototype, the monstrous wind generator will absolutely dwarf Airbus’s famed A380.

Designing anything at the epic scale comes with a whole new set of challenges—from the big scientific breakthroughs to the small questions of logistics. On one hand, Siemens had to redesign some of the blade’s fundamental geometry to save weight—if they’d merely made their old blade bigger, it weigh 10-20% more (which would have a cumulative impact on the entire wind generator structure). Yet on the other, Siemens had to sweat all the small stuff, like figuring out how to manufacture the Quantum’s mold in multiple parts just so it could be transported, or finding a route from the factory to the test site with roads that could accommodate a 250-foot-long vehicle. Even painting the thing was a challenge: Siemens couldn’t use their paint house because it wasn’t large enough, so instead, the Quantum was painted on site.

(via scinerds)

Source: dawnawakened

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