14 DAY TRIAL // Wind farms are quite popular among environmentalists, and this is chiefly because they are a great source of clean energy. The problem is that, during wintertime, they risk turning into giant icicles and therefore fail to harves the wind power coming their way.
American multinational conglomerate corporation General Electric hopes to solve this problem by developing a new coating for them.
The company is confident that, should the innovative coating it is currently working on start being mass-produced and used on a large scale, wind farms will no longer have trouble rolling out green energy in sub-zero temperatures.
According to Inhabitat, the coating specialists with General Electric are busy developing a superhydrophobic one.
This means that it works by making it possible for wind turbines to shake off the ice that would otherwise engulf them and keep them from working properly.
Interestingly enough, the working principles behind this superhydrophobic coating are pretty much the same that plants rely on in order to shed the rain droplets that fall on them.
The same source details that, the way General Electric sees things, its plant-inspired coating would act as a deicing system that would be both permanent and passive.
Consequently, wind farm operators would no longer have to apply deicing agents on a regular basis. Besides, they would not need to employ various methods to heat the blades that become frozen.
General Electric goes on to explain that, whenever wind farm operators find that some blades have become engulfed in ice, they must use energy in one form or another to heat them and get them back online.
The company says that this counts as waste, and that using heat to defrost blades is bound to translate into a drop in the net energy gain from a given wind turbine.
By switching to using its superhydrophobic coating instead of run-off-the-mill heating methods, energy waste would no longer be an issue, General Electric argues.