How Is Airbus Planning to Halve Testing Time Without Cutting the Evidence? Hybrid aircraft testing is moving from research programmes into mainstream development. Airbus wants to halve testing lead times on its A320 successor. It plans to do this by combining physical and virtual assessment far more closely. Thierry Raffy, Airbus’s vice president of test
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How Do Engineers Prove a Wind Turbine Will Survive 25 Years of Operation? A modern wind turbine runs almost unattended for 20 to 30 years. Its blades flex millions of times. The gearbox handles huge, constantly changing loads. Meanwhile, the electrical systems must cope with a fluctuating grid. Engineers cannot simply hope all of this
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Can a 110-Metre Blade Be Built to Last 25 Years and Still Come Apart Cleanly? Recyclable wind blades have just taken a big step in scale. In late September, CRRC announced a 110-metre blade designed to be taken apart and recycled. The company says it recovers over 95% of the key raw materials. Meanwhile, the
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What Makes Offshore Wind Turbines So Much More Challenging to Engineer Than Onshore? The UK leads the world in offshore wind capacity. Hornsea and Dogger Bank, two of the largest wind farms ever built, sit off Britain’s east coast — generating power from turbines positioned miles out to sea, in water depths and weather conditions
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How Did Engineers Make the Second So Precise? At 2am on Sunday 25 October, UK clocks go back an hour. That change is a human agreement. The second itself is different. Engineers have spent centuries making it more precise. This article follows that journey, from swinging pendulums to caesium atoms. Every Clock Needs a Steady
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Why Are Wind Turbine Blades Sometimes Not Turning — Even When It’s Windy? Most people have driven past a wind farm on a breezy day and noticed something odd. Some turbines spin steadily. Others stand completely still. It looks like a fault. In reality, a stationary turbine on a windy day is usually working exactly
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How Do a Spring, a Few Gears and a Tiny Wheel Keep Time So Accurately? A mechanical watch has no battery and no electronics. Yet the best ones keep time to within a few seconds a day. That is clockwork mechanism engineering at its finest. Four simple ideas make it work: store energy, transmit it,
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Could a Wind Turbine Store Its Own Energy Inside Its Transmission? Wind turbine energy storage tackles wind power’s biggest weakness. Turbines generate electricity when the wind blows, not when demand calls for it. Conventional wind farms simply feed power to the grid as it arrives. However, a University of Nottingham concept called WindTP takes a
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Can AI Rebuild a CAD Model, and Does It Understand Why It Was Built That Way? AI CAD modelling has taken a visible step forward in recent weeks. SOLIDWORKS previewed AI this summer that turns imported STEP and IGES files into editable, feature-based parts. Then, in September, Autodesk showed a very similar idea for Fusion.
Why Are Wind Turbine Blades Shaped the Way They Are? A wind turbine blade and an aircraft wing have more in common than most people realise. Both rely on the same fundamental aerodynamic principle to generate force. However, where an aircraft wing uses that force to lift a fuselage into the sky, a turbine blade
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