Wind turbines, the new design produces as much electricity as conventional wind turbines, but with half the diameter of the blades. The smaller blade size and other factors allow the new turbines to be clustered more tightly than traditional turbines, increasing the amount of electricity produced per acre of land.
Typically, when wind passes through a turbine, almost half of the air is forced to stay around the blades instead of passing through them, and the energy in this wind is lost. Conventional wind turbines can only use up to 59.3% of wind energy, a value known as the Betz limit.
The wind turbine, a design borrowed from jet engine technology, overcomes a fundamental flaw that exists in conventional wind turbines. Shrouds around the blades of wind turbines guide air past the blades and accelerate them, which increases power production.
A wind turbine is like the air intake of a jet engine. When air enters, it first encounters a set of stationary blades, called the stator, which directs the air into a set of rotating blades called the rotor. The air pushes the rotors and emerges on the other side, where the air flows more slowly than it would outside the turbine. The shroud is suitably shaped so that it directs the relatively faster-flowing air outside into the area behind the rotor. The fast-moving air accelerates the slow-moving air, causing the area behind the turbine blades to become low pressure to draw more air through them.
