The slur on the driving/flying skills of all extra terrestrials was lifted today – first findings from the forensic examination of the damaged windmill bits are that it definitely wasn’t a collision of any kind. That lets the MOD off the hook too.
We’ve just had the interim report from ENERCON, the manufacturer of our wind turbines, and they say that they found ‘classic signs of fatigue failure’ in the ring of about 30 bolts, that usually hold the blades on.
Interestingly though they’ve ruled out material or other defect in the bolts themselves, judging that the bolt fatigue is more likely ‘effect’ than ’cause’ of the blade loss.
The attention has shifted now to the components on either side of the ring of bolts, the theory being that a failure somewhere else in the chain of components is at the root of things.
We’re expecting a final conclusion in a couple of weeks and hope to be able to publish the report in full here.
Meanwhile it’s sad but true to say it looks like we’ve not been visited by beings from another planet (unless you count the Sun reporters… 🙂 ) and it wasn’t some kind of kill crazy flying tank from the MOD. A rather more mundane everyday kind of explanation appears to be emerging.
BTW this also means it wasn’t, def wasn’t, some kind of ball lightning or plasma – and of course not ice falling in cow sized lumps…
Shame in a way, the truth seems rather tame by comparison.
Cheers.
So, now that UFO’s and MI5 craft have been ruled out, what are we going to talk about?
Hehehe!!!
Thanks for the update Dale – it would appear that the reality of the cause as you point out, is almost always far more mundane than we would like it to be!
Hi guys,
Interesting that the bolts are NOT THE CAUSE of the blade being dislodged.So what would cause the bolts to fail might i ask other than some sort of collision??
The truth is out there!
Dammit, I much prefer the little green man story over this ring of bolts thing. <:( And I can’t imagine the Sun will follow this up with a front page story on the wonders of faulty bolts!!
fatigue failure is when a component is repeatedly loaded, eventually causing rupture of the component. The failure is not caused by a single load, but when the load is repeated enough times, it breaks. That rules out collision, unless said object collided at least several, perhaps thousands of, times.
I don’t know how ENERCON came to the judgement that bolt fatigue is ‘effect’ rather than ’cause’, but if that is the case, it sounds like something else broke first, leading to abnormal loads in the bolts for some period of time before they finally broke themselves.
“It wasn’t ET!” Or maybe the men in black have visted Dale at Ecotricity and used their brain zap guns to make Dale say this. What next? it’ll be a weather balloon that did it, or maybe sheep perching on the blade?
Fatigue is one of, if not the, most common cause of failure of engineered components (an estimated 40% of parts fail by fatigue). There’s two types (high cycle and low cycle) and I’d think it’s high cycle fatigue that got you here! Very mundane form of failure, shame, like many others I thought the alien story was fun.
There’s a possible upside, they say any publicity is good publicity – have you found that all the media attention has helped customer recruitment?!