Articulated wooden blades for a horizontal-axis wind turbine. Design, construction and testing.

A pair of blades were constructed following a Tapered Chord, Zero Twist pattern after Anderson. The construction uses the Wood Epoxy Saturation Technique, with a solid Beech main spar and leading edge joined together with laminated veneers of beech forming a D-section; the trailing edge is formed from millimetre ply skins, foam filled to resist compressive loads. This construction leads to an extremely light, flexible blade, with the centres of gravity and torsion well forward, giving good stability. Each blade has three built-in strain gauges, alowing flapwise bending to be measured. Stiffness, and natural frequencies, were measured, to input to a numerical computer model to calculate blade deformation during operation, and to determine stability boundaries of the blade. Preliminary aerodynamic performance measurements are presented and close agreement is found with theory.

High-frequency acousto-electric single-photon source

We propose a single optical photon source for quantum cryptography based on the acoustoelectric effect. Surface acoustic waves (SAWs) propagating through a quasi-one-dimensional channel have been shown to produce packets of electrons that reside in the SAW minima and travel at the velocity of sound. In our scheme, the electron packets are injected into a p-type region, resulting in photon emission. Since the number of electrons in each packet can be controlled down to a single electron, a stream of single- (or N-) photon states, with a creation time strongly correlated with the driving acoustic field, should be generated. ©2000 The American Physical Society.

Comments on "micro-scale abrasive wear testing of PVD coatings on curved substrates"

Previously published expressions for the wear volume in the micro-scale abrasion test for curved specimen surfaces (K.L. Rutherford and I.M. Hutchings, Tribology Letters 2 (1996) 1-11) were based upon erroneous assumptions about the wear-scar geometry. Accurate volumes have now been computed, and the errors in the use of the original analytical equations are shown to be negligibly small (<0.5% error) for all practical cases. © J.C. Baltzer AG, Science Publishers.