Wind energy - Wooden blades

Wood might be a pretty good substance to make some turbine blades from.

Unlike me, it's strong, light, flexible, and easy to work with.

It can also be shaped with a few tools that I already own. I also have a bit of experience with shaping wood from an earlier "thing" from my 120 things in 20 years.

Pictured here is a wooden lure body from a previous post on getting the most out of your printer by making hand made fishing lures with it. It even has the wing shape that I'll need as the profile for my turbine blade.

But enough self promotion...

By stacking a few different bits of wood together, it should be possible to give a turbine blade shape a bit of a head start.

We want an angled up, thicker wing shape in the centre, and a thinner, flatter wing shape at the tip.

Because the middle bit is moving slower that the tip, we need a bi-plane wing in the middle, and a jet wing at the tip, and everything else in between.

Then we should be able to cut away the bits that don't look like a turbine blade, giving us a nice curve that looks a bit like a propeller. 











And then shape the blade into that progressively thinner and flatter wing shape.

If we start by making cuts that join the dots so we cut from "A" to "B", we should get the angles roughly correct.

Then it should be a simple matter to round off the front edge (thick green smudge) in such a way as to make the front round, and the thickest point of the turbine 1/3 back from the front. So a line running the length of the blade running through point "C" would be the thickest bit.



With the guide points created by the corners made by the different heights of wood, there might even be a chance that I can make a second blade that looks a bit like the first. It needs to be very close to exact, so I might need a little luck, or some brand new skills.

That's the theory. I'll give it a go, and see what happens.