Rotor
Wind Turbine Blade Number Trade-offs
Introduction Nearly every utility-scale wind turbine built today has three blades. This was not inevitable. One-blade and two-blade machines were built and fielded in the 1980s and 1990s, and multi-blade rotors dominated the farm windmill era for a century. The three-blade configuration won a genuine… Read more
Jet Engine Fuse Pin Fracture & Fatigue
Fuse Pins: The Structural Fuse That Holds the Engine On Jet engine pylons contain deliberately weakened pins designed to shed the engine under extreme overload — and two Boeing 747 freighter accidents showed what happens when the fuse itself fails from fatigue. An electrical fuse… Read more
Machinery Vibration Alarm Sensors
Wilcoxon Sensing Technologies 4-20 mA vibration transmitters and iT301 intelligent transmitter. Image courtesy of Wilcoxon Sensing Technologies Machinery Vibration Monitoring: Alarm & Trip Protection How permanently installed vibration sensors decide when to warn the operator — and when to shut the machine down. Rotating machinery… Read more
Ryanair 1879: Engine Failure, Window Loss & Partial Passenger Ejection
Ryanair FR1879 — Fault Tree Analysis | VibrationData VIBRATIONDATA · INCIDENT ANALYSIS T. IRVINE · 11 JUL 2026 A fault tree for the July 10 uncontained engine failure over North Macedonia — and why one seatbelt turned a repeat of Southwest 1380 into an injury… Read more
Composite Material Coatings
The carbon fiber automotive part in the photo above shows two composite engineering choices worth examining before it ever sees the road: the woven fabric architecture visible through the surface, and the glossy clear coat protecting it. Composite structures rarely fail in the fiber direction… Read more
Highmore, South Dakota Wind Turbine Collapse
Introduction In the predawn hours of June 29, 2026, a severe thunderstorm complex swept across central South Dakota. The South Dakota Mesonet station at Highmore, in Hyde County, recorded a straight-line wind gust of 131 mph (58.6 m/s) at about 6:15–6:25 a.m. local time. The… Read more
Yeongdeok Wind Farm: A Blade Fatigue Failure, a Tower Collapse, and a Fatal Lesson About Manual Inspection
Two incidents at the same wind farm, seven weeks apart, tell a single engineering story that’s worth unpacking carefully. On February 2, 2026, an 80-meter Vestas turbine at the Yeongdeok wind farm in North Gyeongsang Province, South Korea, snapped roughly a third of the way… Read more
Touch, Hearing, Stethoscopes, and Stroboscopes in Machinery Vibration Monitoring
SKF Image Before the Accelerometer: Touch, Hearing, Stethoscopes, and Stroboscopes in Machinery Vibration Monitoring Long before FFT analyzers, wireless accelerometers, and machine-learning anomaly detection, machinery condition monitoring was done with the human hand, the human ear, a screwdriver, and a flashing lamp. These methods are… Read more
Apache Tail Rotor
The AH-64 Apache tail rotor has four blades. The blades, however, are not oriented 90° (perpendicular) from each other as in most helicopters. This unusual arrangement is required because the two sets of blades use a “Delta-Hinge“ which allows the blades to simultaneously flap and… Read more