http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage...cle2108149.ece
*sigh*
It is an interesting mystery, what did happen to this wind turbine?
Unfortunately a lot of people will read it and conclude it must have been an alien space craft. Frankly the witness reports of lights in the sky can be easily explained away, 4am that night was outstandingly clear (I recall because I tweated about it and live in Grimsby, very close to Louth and the wind farm) and there were some particularly bright stars to the east and south. Vega, Acturus, Saturn and Regulus were all very easily visible and to many could have appeared unusual. The day time sighting is harder to brush away bt all of the pictures seem to be of the sun behind clouds, perhaps there was some interesting reflective or refractive atmospheric phenomena.
Any thoughts on what could have caused the damage?
A military aircraft flying lower than it should have been and lucky to make it back to base?
Incidentally, The Sun reports that the blade is missing, whereas the BBC states the blade has been recovered and is being examined.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/l...re/7817378.stm
I'm going for mechanical failure causing it to throw a blade, that then gets fouled in the second one. Banging could well have been caused by the unbalanced prop.
"Flying Saucer Bureau" lol lol lol
Touched by his noodly appendage?
That was roughly my first thought. Why is it being assumed that anything hit it at all?Originally Posted by Mongrel
To someone with no experience in engineering or mechanics, the idea that it would just fling it off sonds somewhat unlikely.
Because "UFO hit wind turbine" is a better headline than "Wind turbine blade might have fallen off or been hit by something, we really don't know yet"
There's nothing like having a tight connection between events, is there?(from the Sun article)"Then I saw a low flying object. It was skimming across the sky towards the turbines.”
Hours later there was an almighty smash.
Clearly, windfarms reaching to hundreds of feet high are a new hazard for unsuspecting low-flying alien craft. Previously, there's been nothing like that, except, of course, for a nationwide network of cables and electricity pylons hundreds of feet high.
Such hazards could only be avoided by using some kind of advanced technology (like primitive radar), and what kind of typically night-flying high-speed craft would bother having things like that on board?
It's held onto the hub by some bolts, and if one or two of them where to fail it would become unstable and could easily damage the other blade as it worked loose or deformed under abnormal stresses. It's good these things don't revolve very fast or it could have been flung quite a distance.
Whilst structural failure is rare it's not impossible, and statistically it's bound to happen at some point.
Lightning - or has that been ruled out?
Like Mongrel said, once the blade is damaged it would continue to make things worse. If it was running at the time of course.
.
One might even argue that if no turbines ever failed, that would suggest that they'd been made unnecessarily strong.
All sorts of possibilities as to what could have damaged a turbine sufficiently for it to throw a blade - something thrown from or falling off a plane is a possibility (the 'low flying object' followed some hours later by an almight smash might support this).
Pure guesswork but if I was designing a turbine blade I would make sure it had excellent tensile strength (continual force being stretching). Engineering being about compromises, that might make it vulnerable to lateral impacts.
Turbine blade failure not that rare according to http://www.auchencorth.org.uk/documents/safety.pdf
I notice one of the common possibilities is 'ice throw'!
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