The prospect, as one of the leaders of the visionary government-funded US R&D project puts it, is “mind-blowing but entirely possible”.
The “extreme-scale” Segmented Ultralight Morphing Rotor (SUMR) concept, being spearheaded out of the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is about economies of scale — on paper, wider swept area equals greater energy capture. But its bigger impact may be in sparking a revolution in engineering for the offshore wind turbines to come, from the material science of the blade edge through to the logistics of balance-of-plant power generation.
“This
