Wind Turbines: "Those Magnificent Wind Machines" 1980 NASA Lewis Research Center

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• published: 13 Sep 2015
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more at http://scitech.quickfound.net "The evolution of the NASA wind program is traced from 1973 to 1980. Wind turbines for producing energy are discussed extensively. This is part of the NASA at Work video series produced by Lewis Research Center." Public domain film from NASA, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied. The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_wind_turbines Starting in 1975, NASA managed a program for the United States Department of Energy and the United States Department of Interior to develop utility-scale wind turbines for electric power, in response to the increase in oil prices. A number of the world's largest wind turbines were developed and tested under this pioneering program. The program was an attempt to leap well beyond the then-current state of the art of wind turbine generators, and developed a number of technologies later adopted by the wind turbine industry. The development of the commercial industry however was delayed by a significant decrease in competing energy prices during the 1980s... Program origin In 1974, partially in response to the increase in oil price after the 1973 oil crisis, the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), later part of United States Department of Energy, appointed a department under the direction of Louis Divone to fund research into utility-scale wind turbines. NASA, through its Lewis Research Center in Sandusky Ohio (now the Glenn Research Center) was assigned the task of coordination of development by large contractors such as General Electric, Westinghouse, United Technologies and Boeing. In 1975 NASA designed and built its first prototype wind turbine, the 100 kW Mod-0 in Sandusky Ohio, with funding from the National Science Foundation and ERDA. The Mod-0 was modeled after the light weight two-bladed research turbine by Austrian Ulrich Hütter. The two-bladed wind turbine with flexible or teetered rotor hubs characterized the NASA-led program. NASA and its contractors found that two blades can produce essentially equivalent energy as three blades but at a savings of the cost and weight of a blade. Two-blade rotors turn faster than equivalent three-blade rotors, reducing the ratio in the gearbox. Flexibility in the rotor minimizes the transfer of bending loads into the drive train; none of the NASA wind turbines experienced gearbox failures that are often a problem for rigid rotor systems in use today... The first design was MOD-0, built near the Lewis Research Center in Sandusky, Ohio and operational in September 1975. It served as a test bed for development of many concepts for use in larger units. This design had a 38-metre diameter downwind two-bladed rotor, coupled to a synchronous generator, with a power rating of 100 kW at 8 m/s wind speed. A speed increaser stepped up the 40 r/min of the turbine to drive an 1800 r/min generator. The power output of the machine was regulated by pitching the rotor blades... NASA contracted with General Electric in 1978 to scale up from the MOD-0A with a 10-fold increase in power. The Mod-1 was the first wind turbine in the world to produce 2 megawatts and also General Electric's first wind turbine... In 1977 Boeing won the NASA and US-DOE contract for the design, fabrication, construction, installation and testing of several 2.5-megawatt wind turbine models in the United States. The first four MOD-2 models went into operation during the early 1980s... The MOD-5B wind turbine, built in 1987, was the largest operating wind turbine in the world in the 1990s. The contract to build the Mod-5B was awarded to Boeing in 1980 and it was installed on Oahu in 1987. With a rated capacity of 3.2 megawatts, it weighed 426,000 kg (939,000 lb) and had a 100 m (330 ft) diameter two-blade rotor on a 60 m (200 ft) steel tower. Early operation of the Mod-5B demonstrated a good availability of 95 percent for the new first-unit wind turbine. Early in 1988, operation of the turbine was transferred to Hawaiian Electric Industries, then to the Makani Uwila Power Corporations (MUPC), and kept in service intermittently until late in 1996. Because of financial difficulties, the wind turbine was shut down, along with the rest of MUPC, and passed to the property owner, Campbell Estates. Campbell Estates decided to disassemble the unit and sell it for scrap. The DOE salvaged the drive train gearbox and generator in July 1998... Total cost of the program between 1974 and 1992 was $330 million. For reference, the global wind market had reached $47 billion annually by 2008...