

When you ride a bicycle, the dynamo touching the back wheel spins around and Turbines and you can think of it as being a bit like an enormous, scaled-up version of the dynamo on a bicycle.
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The generator is an essential part of all Relatively slow rotation of the spinning blades into higher-speed motion-turning the drive shaft quickly enough to power the electricity generator. For most (but not all) turbines,Īnother key part is a gearbox whose gears convert the Key parts of a wind turbine?Īlthough we talk about "wind turbines," the turbine is only one of Photo by Lance Cheung courtesy of US Air Force. The white blades at the front connect via an axle (gray-under the engineer's feet) to the gearbox and generatorīehind (blue). Photo: Head for heights! You can see just how big a wind turbine is compared to thisĮngineer, who's standing right inside the nacelle (main unit) carrying out maintenance. Linking many wind turbines together into a large farm, and linking many wind farms in different areas into a national power grid, produces a much more steady supply overall. Wind varies all the time so the electricity produced by a single wind turbine varies as well. That's because the energy in wind is proportional to the cube of its speed. Obviously, faster winds help too: if the wind blows twice as quickly, there's potentially eight times more energy available for a turbine to harvest. Proportional to the area that its rotor blades sweep out in other words, the longer the rotor blades, the more energy a turbine will generate. As you might expect, the amount of energy that a turbine makes is The wind loses some of its kinetic energy (energy of movement) and the turbine gains just as much. When wind blows past a plane's wings, it moves them upward with a force we call lift when it blows past a turbine's blades, it spins them around instead. The blades have a special curved shape, similar to the airfoil wings on a plane.

The huge rotor blades on the front of a wind turbine are the "turbine" part. Even a child's toy windmill is a simple form of turbine. Hydroelectric power plants and from diesel railroad locomotives to windmills. In a moving fluid (liquid or gas) and catches some of the energy passing by.Īll sorts of machines use turbines, from jet engines to How can we store the power of the wind?Ī turbine, like the ones in a wind farm, is a machine that spins around.Advantages and disadvantages of wind turbines.How does a turbine generate electricity?.
