Hey have I shared my wind machine story? So back in the early 80s
before the wind tax credits expired some of the big companies were
building some large wind machines and testing them out west. Company I
worked for was doing some work for Hamilton Standard which was building
the rotors for them. There was a prototype machine out near Medicine
Bow, WY out on the high plains we went to see. 5MW, 250 tall at the
nacelle, 220ft or so rotor blade length. It was big. There were a
coupla other machines out there, one from Boeing I think, and another
one too. This one we visited had been running for awhile but that day
the wind was not blowing enough (very atypical), I think this was like
February or so, it was COLD out there, and esp up on top of the
machine. Not much other than sagebrush and antelopes and snow. We took
a little elevator up the stand into the nacelle where the reduction
transmission and generator were, along with some switching gear and
such. It was big, had a hatch on top you could climb up a ladder and
stand on top, which was very amazing (but freezing cold!). Great view
from up there. The blades were maybe 6-8ft diameter at the root, you
could crawl out into the hub and out into the blades most of the way, it
was huge.
I had been to the HS factory in CN where they were making the blades, it
was this big lathe kind of thing with a mandrel they put fiberglass
strands soaked in epoxy on with this traveling thing that had big reels
of fiberglass rope, it just went back and forth laying down the fibers
in criss-cross fashion. Took awhile to make one. Then they put them on
rail cars to get out there, trucks the final ride from a railhead. On a
side note at that time HS had never had an operational failure of a
propeller in normal use since they had been building props. Interesting
fact.
We spent a few hours poking around, went down to the control room where
they monitored the thing. Guys told us that when it was built some
genius had wired it backwards so instead of putting power into the grid
it drew power out of the grid. And in a fortuitous serendipitous FAIL
some other genius of an electrician also wired the wattmeter backassards
so it was indicating draw as output and vice versa. So when they first
flipped the switch on the machine it spun up quite nicely and was
indicating 5MW of output, everything running great. They get a call
from BPA (I think that was the grid they were tied into) asking them WTF
they were doing out there to be drawing 5MW from the grid in about 3
minutes, were they doing some kind of whack experiment or something.
They had no idea what he was talking about, everything was indicating
normal. But they feathered the machine and shut it down while they
tried to figure it out. A tech comes into the control bunker and says
hey the blades were bending forward I thought they were supposed to bend
backwards when the wind blew on them... UHOH... The thing was running
as a giant fan not a windmill... so they went through everything and
found the complementary wiring errors...
--
--FT
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