Wind Turbines

From Wind wiki

The most familiar forms of wind turbines are the horizontal axis ones that look like conventional windmills. Vertical axis ones, some of which look like egg beaters, also are in use but they are few in number.

The principle of wind turbines is very simple. Just as wind energy is utilized to make a sailboat move over water; wind energy is used to run large fans and turbines. When any object is placed in the path of the wind, the wind pushes it and, in the process, transfers some of its own power to the object. If this object is specifically engineered to provide lift, the object will move.

The turbines are usually pointed upwind as turbine towers produce a lot of air turbulence at the rear of it. The blades of a turbine are made very stiff to avoid the blades being blown towards the tower by fast winds. They are also placed at a good distance from the tower and angled to a degree to prevent them from snapping off and damaging the tower housing.

In the case of turbines, each blade in the rotor is designed for lift allowing the rotor to rotate. This rotation drives a low velocity shaft attached to a gear coupled to a high velocity shaft that eventually ends in the generator housing.

The magnetic rotor located on the end of the high speed shaft spins inside of a series of loops of copper wire wound around an iron cast. When the rotor starts to spin, electromagnetic induction takes place producing the electric current. This current is either then fed into the power grid (direct connection) or passed through a series of electronic components (indirect connection) and transformed into something useful.