Revolutionary Wind-Turbine Blade from Texas Startup Company

A Texas-based startup company recently received an award for a new type of wind-turbine blade that some are describing as revolutionary.

Wetzel Engineering of Pflugerville, Texas, are among the winners of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Industry Growth Forum for their new pre-fabricated, field-assembled wind-turbine blade.

The blade is easier to transport and assemble than other blades and, according to the company, boosts production capacity and can outlast current designs.

Currently, fully assembled blades can reach 58-meters in length and require entire convoys of trucks and personnel to transport safely. The Wetzel Blade could potentially end this dilemma.

Kyle Wetzel, CTO and founder of Wetzel Blade says the design concept evolved from a project the company was involved with in China.

We were engineering a 100-meter blade for a 10MW turbine and wanted to eliminate shell panel buckling as a design driver. The balsa requirements presented another challenge – almost 10,000 kg of this expensive core material absorbing ~6,000kg of epoxy."

Wetzel went on to say that the blade could fill many market needs.

Because of our involvement with the entire turbine lifecycle, we understand that to make a real shift in the economics, a blade design must generate more electricity, cost less to build and maintain, and be more efficient to transport and install. The industry is hungry for a solution that delivers on all those points."

The blade is still undergoing testing and a sub-scale model will reportedly be demonstrated in 2015. The project is funded in part by a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.