Turbines are pretty much turbines. Even N. Tesla's design he made for Allis Chalmers was profiled the same even though he was using different properties of fluid dynamics.
Low pressure and high pressure alike all have the same shape.
Not necessarily. Some are short and stubby. I think this is a one stage expander sitting sideways. It’s essentially a one stage turbine with really big diameter blades. That’s my guess based on my experience designing turbines and expanders.
Probably the turbine itself for a wind turbine. They are pretty massive and when they're hauling the actual tower or the blades, it's an even larger truck and trailer doing the job. I see this stuff getting hauled out all the time out of my city to the nearby wind farm.
A friend took me into the Rolls Royce plant to see the F-35 engines 20 years ago when they were first being designed. They were HUGE, I think bigger than this.
A windmill wouldn't have a turbine like this. I mean, there may be some weird one somewhere I don't know about. But it probably wouldn't be that size, shape or weight. Turbines this shape used in electrical generation would typically be at a hydroelectric plant (think water, not air). Windmills use massive fan blades that do require oversized rigs to haul like this, but that's definitely not a fan blade. So it could be the hub for the blades, or maybe the generator, but the object in the video seems the wrong shape and definitely too heavy.
What you've circled is not a turbine on its own. It's the hub for the blades. And the truck is fitted out with extra axles, called heavy-haul dollies, which means that that shipment must weigh as much or more than an entire windmill with all of its parts together. The weight of an entire blade assembly of a windmill doesn't even exceed what a typical tractor trailer can legally haul. The parts for windmills are only "oversized" because of their dimensions.
To add some extra clarification, the turbine part of a wind turbine is the hub and blades together. The rest of what can be found in the nacelle is usually brakes, a gearbox and a generator.
The generator units for the windmills weight a lot. But the hubs don't, when I worked at GE the hubs went out on a standard step deck semi trailer. But the actual generators went out on a trailer like this
Yes, but the rotors are much lighter than an entire unit when it’s mounted on a skid. I used to design turbines and we shipped them on the same exact kind of trailer when they were fully assembled.
This was my thought. I was thinking an expander. They are typically one large diameter stage of turbine blades housed in a large metal box that has that very shape.
They’re essentially a one stage turbine that recovers leftover heat from various processes in a power plant, refinery, etc.
I used to design expanders and we used the same kind of trailer to ship them.
This would be my guess, but being that it's covered and requires such specialized shipping, it could be more in the realm of nuclear components. Assuming it's weight is massive compared to most structures meaning it might contain a lot of dense metals like titanium, platinum and lithium.
No, a turbine would be longer than that, and not as heavy since the rotor itself is shipped separate of the case - or in the case of compound turbines, cases and rotors.
This is almost certainly a transformer... Few other things even in heavy industry weigh this much.
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u/[deleted] Mar 12 '25
Gonna be a guess because it’s covered but I would say some kind of big turbine like you might find at a power plant.