Quote:
Originally Posted by elhigh
You gave the foglight hole half a square meter!?
Oh, you so crazy. Or generous. Or - and this isn't completely outside the realm of possibility (though it is making an escape attempt) - that really is one mother of a foglight.
Any turbine that claims more than its face area is working from the maxim regarding fools and their money.
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No, there actually are turbine designs that use more than the frontal area as kinetic energy surfaces.
You can make a parabola, make thin slices into it, and then turn the "fins" that you just cut so they're facing a "correct" angle into the wind. This means that there is more workable surface than just the frontal area, but it also slows down/changes wind direction to meet all the available surface area.
I suspect these designs are only good in areas with wind speeds over 50MPH, where normal prop-turbines are (apparently) not efficient. The design might be good for this, since it forces slowing of the air before making full surface contact, so very little of the surface area is wasted on slowing the air, while an area that's still larger than the exposed frontal area is being used to generate power at the new "lower" speed.
Of course, as speed of a fluid falls, pressure increases, which means that air "stacks" in the turbine, more so than with a traditional prop design.
I hope you can picture what I'm explaining, because I can't find an example of it.
And yes, that's one HONKIN' fog light.