do wind turbines revolve to face the wind or are they rigid ?????

Answer 1

Depends on the design, the vast majority do.

The method for moving it can be anything from a wind vane to a pitot tube

A vane would be acted on directly by the force of the wind, a pitot tube would send a differential pressure signal to a motor to turn the turbine housing.

Vertically oriented, or "Eggbeater style" wind turbines don't have to face the wind, they work no matter what direction the wind is blowing. They kinda look like the illegitimate offspring of a transmission tower and a football *lmao*

In fact, if memory serves me, they did an article years ago in Popular Science magazine about a sailboat(?) that was powered by vertically oriented wind turbines to propellors.

Answer 2

Thanks for the question, because it brought back memories!

I'm a stormchaser, and in early June a few years ago, I was chasing in Kansas. There was a line of storms approaching from the WNW, and there is a whole bunch of those huge windmills a few miles SW of Dodge City. It's called a wind farm. You can even see them on the Dodge City radar when there is a bit of anamolous propagation.

Anyway, I stopped to watch the approaching storminess right underneath one of the windmills where there is a small parking lot. A few of my chaser buddies were already there.

The wind was blowing strongly from the SE, as it often does when storms approach, and the windmills were facing SE because of that. I took notice that there are little weather vanes at the top of them telling the computers inside which way they should be facing. As the storm got real close, very suddenly the cold ouflow winds began blowing from the WNW, and all these many windmills began turning the almost 180 degrees to face the new wind direction. I would estimate they made the turn in about 3 to 4 minutes, but because of the imminent danger of the storm, we all took off to the east before they completed their turns.

It was pretty cool to watch.

Answer 3

A wind turbine is a machine for converting the kinetic energy in wind into mechanical energy. If the mechanical energy is used directly by machinery, such as a pump or grinding stones, the machine is usually called a windmill. If the mechanical energy is then converted to electricity, the machine is called a wind generator.

There's lots of information on Wind Turbines at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbines#Advantages_of_vertical_wind_turbines

It mentions:
Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines (HAWT)
Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWT)

and pretty much everything you need to know (I hope).

Answer 4

A wind turbine design is based on a windmill and will spin on its pole to face the oncoming wind and get the maximum benefit from the moving air in the same way that a windmill does. The blades will spin and the weel will turn and rather than grinding corn it will produce power. Efficiency of windturbines has improved enormously, these are largly underestimated, or I hope they are.

Answer 5

Yes, they do turn to face the wind, that way they can receive the maximum turning efficiency of the wind.

If the wind is too strong (could overspin the generator or over speed the blades) they can adjust the pitch of the blades to continue operation and optimise uptime.

Answer 6

Yes they do turn to face the wind.
Even old windmills had a spinning blade at the back to do the same job - to optimise the power generated by turning to directly face the wind.

Answer 7

They are rigid but not fixed so they turn to face the wind.

Answer 8

Well now,.... "THINK" !
....if they were rigid, and the wind changes direction, and they need to face the wind to "WORK",....how could they continue to face the wind without being able to revolve, or swing around to face it????

Answer 9

yes, wind turbines & windmills all pivot on a central point to optimize the amount of wind available

Answer 10

they do turn to face the wind, and the blades tilt to catch the wind and rotate.