Student refines 100-year-old math problem, expanding wind energy possibilities
10 comments
·February 24, 2025gowld
meander_water
> “Improving the power coefficient of a large wind turbine by just 1% has significant impacts on the energy production of a turbine, and that translates towards the other coefficients that we derived relations for,” she said. "A 1% improvement in power coefficient could notably increase a turbine’s energy output, potentially powering an entire neighborhood."
iAMkenough
Curious to see how the rest of the world benefits from this US Navy-supported research while the US itself withdraws from wind energy.
ZeWaka
I believe you misread the article, her current work is supported by the Navy, the subject of this article is not.
toss1
>>her current work is supported by the Navy
The operative question in today's administration is: "For how long?", because as soon as Elon's juvenile henchmen find it, they'll cut it. If they had no hesitation firing people who secured our nations nuke stockpile, Avian Flu researchers, lawyers who keep drunk pilots out of cockpits, etc., etc., etc., they will have no hesitation to dump this valuable research.
terrapinelectri
[dead]
metalman
She found a 1% increase in turbine blade efficiency, with a pencil, and her brain, in her "spare" time. Not just turbine blade, but any airofoil that is spinning. And no one finds 1%, all at once anymore, or that was the conventional thinking, with the 1% or better days, long long gone, but here it is.
MrLeap
I don't think she found a 1% increase in efficiency. I think she was being aspirational as to what her contribution could lead to.
pinoy420
[flagged]
empath75
I love that she did that, but I really get annoyed by college PR departments reaching for practical applications for anything cool done in math. IMO refining a 100 year old problem is good enough for a press release!
> The objective of the present work is to determine the exact integrals for thrust and bending moment coefficients, serving as an addendum to Glauert's original work deriving optimum power coefficients.
I don't think any "wind energy possibilities" were expanded. It looks like the student author gave an elegant exact/analytic computation of measurements that are already computable numerically. Remember that all analytic results are always only "Platonic ideal" approximations of real-world engineering results. It's possible, though not at all mentioned in the paper, that these exact solutions might make engineering computations easier.
As always, the tell is that claims made about the paper, but not in the paper are not to be relied upon. Nowhere does the paper claim to measure any quantiative improvement in rotor performance, not even theoretically potential improvements.