Wind Turbine Blades & Wind Turbine Rotors

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Modern wind turbine designs result in new blade designs and blade sizes

Wind turbine technology has been evolving for decades and current versions of these wind turbines are more efficient and powerful than ever before. Even though there have been major improvements in rotor design and generator efficiency, the largest contributing factor to these higher outputs is through improvements in blade design. These modern blade designs enable these newer wind turbines to be quieter and smaller as well. All of these improvements lead to wind turbines that are perfect for modern residential applications.

When wind power was first being used to generate power centuries ago, the blades were made out of mats of reeds. These larger blades did a fair job of catching the wind and would spin the large vertical rotors of these windmills to grind grain. Even though they worked, they were not very efficient and required very large blades to keep the windmill spinning. They also required frequent replacement of these blades because they were built from such a fragile material.

A modern wind turbine rotor pivots the blades against the turbine's body

Over the years these blades improved considerably as did the materials used for their construction. The first major improvements took place after the explosion of aviation and many of the aerodynamic principles used for airplane propellers were being applied to a wind turbine blade to make it spin faster and easier. These wind turbine blade designs continued to evolve as stronger and lighter materials were discovered and used to build these blades. All types of wind turbine blade configurations were tried as well to determine the perfect combination of blade size and number. Eventually most wind turbines settled on a two or three blade design as standard, and this is still being used today in most modern wind turbines.

Another major departure in wind turbine design came with the re-emergence of the vertical axis wind turbine. Even though many of the earliest wind turbines were based on this vertical axis principle, it was replaced over the years with the now standard horizontal design. The reason for this was that the horizontal version was less complex than the vertical version and would also generate a higher output of power. Newer vertical designs have radically improved blades and offer residential customers a very attractive alternative to the horizontal designs.

Another area of improvement in these modern designs is the wind turbine rotor. There have been many changes in the way this assembly rotates and how it provides support for the blades. Older versions of turbines had a very stiff and inflexible wind turbine rotor and would tend to suffer damage in gusting winds. This was because the turbine had no way of rotating its blades out of the wind when it reached a very high velocity. The wind shear created in these gusting winds would have destroyed the rotor assembly of these older turbines. Modern wind turbines solve this problem by allowing with wind turbine rotor to pivot the blades against the body of the turbine to avoid the wind. This ensures that the wind turbine blade assembly can be in position when needed, but is also protected in the event of high winds.