Transporting wind turbine blades by air could help super-size the future of onshore wind farms. Set to revolutionise the way wind turbine parts are transported, the WindRunner is specifically built to carry wind turbine blades as long as metres feet. While extensive testing and simulations have already been conducted in wind tunnels, commercial operations are expected by late It may seem unusual for an energy company to switch to aviation , but US-based energy company Radia created the WindRunner when it faced a problem developing its GigaWind onshore turbines.
Most wind turbine components are transported by road on specialised trucks or by rail for longer distances. Manufacturers already struggle with transporting blades that span 70 metres feet - and can cause traffic to back up while being moved around.. Roads have to be closed, agricultural land sometimes has to be driven through to avoid narrow country roads, and a police escort is needed due to the wide, heavy-load-bearing vehicles. The groundbreaking WindRunner aircraft will be the first to solve this logistical problem and secure the future of giant wind turbines with blades that span a vast metres feet.
This will allow wind farms to become more cost-effective. Before deciding on a purpose-built, fixed-wing aircraft, the company looked at several historical and existing aerotransportation solutions. Realising quickly that it is impractical to modify existing cargo aircraft to be larger, Radia considered buoyant aircraft such as blimps, which were ruled out as they struggle to lift super-heavy objects, are slow in speed, and require a vast cleared area of about acres for landing and take-off.
Helicopters were also considered but were determined not to have sufficient payload capacity to lift or ground a heavy blade or enough significant speed, and were also considered dangerous carriers due to possible wind gusts. Right now, wind turbines are made up of intricate components assembled onsite - however, blades always come in one piece, hence the transportation issue.
Blade segmentation is limited not only by the manufacturing costs of using more raw materials but also by design. A narrower, slender blade has a total blade area of less than 14 to 16 per cent, which results in a net performance loss of 3 to 8 per cent.
