Crash

A crash is a catastrophic (usually spectacular) failure of a device. On this website it usually refers to a generator (wind or otherwise) doing something that it really wasn't designed to do. Crashes injure or kill people and destroy property. They can be due to design errors, storm damage or just plain bad luck.

Windturbine designers that don't take the forces involved properly into account are doing so at their peril.

The force available in the wind goes up with the cube of the windspeed. This means that a doubling in windspeed leads to an eightfold increase in force.

Failures are quite varied, but usually can be grouped like this:

* structural failure (see the lichtenau picture below)
* overspeeding
* maintenance related failures (such as bearings seizing up)
* fatigue induced failures

Each of those has a whole slew of underlying reasons. One storm with windspeeds higher than the survival windspeed of the turbines in its path can leave a swathe of destruction. And even storms that have measured windspeeds that are acceptable can have localized pockets of air (especially at the fringes of the storm) that move faster or extremely gusty.