Betz's law

In aerodynamics, Betz's law indicates the maximum power that can be extracted from the wind, independent of the design of a wind turbine in open flow. It was published in 1919 by the German physicist Albert Betz. The law is derived from the principles of conservation of mass and momentum of the air stream flowing through an idealized "actuator disk" that extracts energy from the wind stream. According to Betz's law, no wind turbine of any mechanism can capture more than 16/27 (59.3%) of the kinetic energy in wind. The factor 16/27 (0.593) is known as Betz's coefficient or the Betz limit. Practical utility-scale wind turbines achieve at peak 75–80% of the Betz limit.

The Betz limit is based on an open-disk actuator. If a diffuser is used to collect additional wind flow and direct it through the turbine, more energy can be extracted, but the limit still applies to the cross-section of the entire structure.

Betz's law applies to all Newtonian fluids, including wind. If all of the energy coming from wind movement through a turbine were extracted as useful energy, the wind speed afterward would drop to zero. If the wind stopped moving at the exit of the turbine, then no more fresh wind could get in; it would be blocked. In order to keep the wind moving through the turbine, there has to be some wind movement, however small, on the other side with some wind speed greater than zero. Betz's law shows that as air flows through a certain area, and as wind speed slows from losing energy to extraction from a turbine, the airflow must distribute to a wider area. As a result, geometry limits the maximum efficiency of any turbine.

British scientist Frederick W. Lanchester derived the same maximum in 1915. The leader of the Russian aerodynamic school, Nikolay Zhukowsky, also published the same result for an ideal wind turbine in 1920, the same year as Betz. It is thus an example of Stigler's law, which posits that no scientific discovery is named after its actual discoverer.

The Betz Limit is the maximum possible energy that can be extracted by an infinitely thin rotor from a fluid flowing at a certain speed.

In order to calculate the maximum theoretical efficiency of a thin rotor (of, for example, a wind turbine), one imagines it to be replaced by a disc that removes energy from the fluid passing through it. At a certain distance behind this disc, the fluid that has passed through the disc has a reduced, but nonzero, velocity.

Applying conservation of mass to the control volume, the mass flow rate (the mass of fluid flowing per unit time) is

$${\displaystyle {\dot {m}}=\rho A_{1}v_{1}=\rho Sv=\rho A_{2}v_{2},}$$