Posted on 02/15/2022 5:12:10 PM PST by nascarnation
Villagers were woken by a 300ft wind turbine crashing down on a Welsh mountainside - after it was blown over during storms which brought 50pmh winds.
The £20million turbine - double the height of Nelson's Column - snapped apart and blades crumpled in raging wind.
Families in the nearby village of Gilfach Goch, near Bridgend, South Wales, told how it sounded like 'thunder and lightning'.
It woke them at around 6.50am on Monday morning and echoed around the valley below.
The 29-turbine Pant Y Wal wind farm opened in 2013 and makes enough power for 19,000 homes - until one was wrecked in the storm at the weekend.
Villagers are questioning how the turbine could have fallen apart during winds of around 50mph and demand officials check the status of neighbouring turbines.
Nordex - the company that manufactured the turbine - said an investigation is now underway to determine the cause of the collapse.
A renewable energy industry expert, who wanted to remain anonymous, told MailOnline that a collapsing turbine is a 'real rarity', adding there 'are more than 10,000 of them up and down the country'. He suggested the materials might have been faulty, but insisted it was 'very unlikely to be the local wind speed' that brought it down.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Uh...NO dummy, it WAS the "wind speed" that brought it down!
Now, the reason it was susceptible to those wind speeds may have been defective materials, components, or design.
Please, clap.
/Heb Bush
Chinese sourced steel?
I’ve heard they have variability in material properties at times....
Yeah. That's a spring day where I live.
I doubt you’ll see many of the locals having a picnic downwind of one of these...
That was Nixon.
The tornado lab at Texas Tech University uses the 2x4 as the standard to determine the tornado resistance of buildings and building materials. Perhaps now they will change out the 2x4 with these wind machines fiberglass blades. Dororthy beware.
It’s not windy until you have to retrieve your dog house and patio furniture from the neighbors yard.
Probably not. Unless they're fans of hawk tartare.
Looks like a total fail of the base support. Clean break right at where it would have been welded or otherwise connected together. Bad welds? If so, it likely wasn’t the only one involved - yet.
A bit of research says these were made in Germany...interesting.
It does seem odd. That’s one of the cleanest breaks I’ve ever seen on something like that. Notice how the entire supporting section isn’t crumpled or dented in anywhere that can be seen. Just the clean break nearer to the bottom. Rusted welds?
I suspect they’ll be crack checking some of the remaining ones. On a calm day....
A renewable energy industry expert, who wanted to remain anonymous, told MailOnline that a collapsing turbine is a ‘real rarity’, adding there ‘are more than 10,000 of them up and down the country’. He suggested the materials might have been faulty, but insisted it was ‘very unlikely to be the local wind speed’ that brought it down.
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Ok… so whenever one reads an article like this, it is ‘mandatory’ that the word ‘rare’ or ‘rarity’ show up in the first few sentences. Then it’s mandatory to make a claim of how many homes it generated power for… even though of course it generates nothing when the wind isn’t blowing. Having said that, there is not much to wonder about as far as the cause…. I can show pictures of dozens of IWTs that have failed the same way. Here are the symptoms…
- Came down in strong winds… but at a wind speed that was only a fraction of what the design wind speed is.
- There is almost no visible damage to the IWT except what happened when it hit the ground. ….case in point is that it looks like the blades were intact when it hit the ground and they crumpled on impact.
- The main tower section actually looks to have escaped relatively unscathed…. just some deformation because of the way it rolled itself over the knoll along side the road.
- It came down at about the 8 to 12 year range…. other lifespans are possible but this seems to be the most common.
- Finally… and this is the key to understanding the failure, there is a flange that has simply separated, and you can’t find a flange bolt anywhere. Neither can you find any distortion to either the top or bottom flanges.....the exception perhaps being where it hit the ground but this isn’t actually all that visible. Logically, wouldn’t one expect that as the tower toppled over, some of the bolts would hang on until it distorted the flange and perhaps ripped it apart? Why didn’t it do that? It’s as if the bolts all magically disappeared. What a lot of people don’t realize is that the flange should be as strong as the tower sections that are in between the flanges. So how does one explain that the bolts all magically disappeared?
The answer is simple… the bolts failed in fatigue. Over the years, the tower sways back in forth due to the winds. There are specific bolt installation protocols and then retightening checks… sometimes that doesn’t get done exactly right but regardless, eventually due to the cyclical loading in response to the winds, bolts develop fatigue cracks and are weakened… and then a decent wind comes along and they essentially all pop at once. The bolts failed in fatigue....what is not known is what all the mitigating factors were.
Well, blow me down! -Popeye
Bearing seizure?
Yup, wage, price, and speed control. Also under his command, he allowed the “don’t shoot until your’re shot at” policy in Viet Nam, too.
But it’s “ECO”
50 MPH winds don’t seem too unusual on occasion for much of the World. It should be able to stay up during that, IMO.
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