Not familiar with those, I’ll have to look at them. I was envisioning rotary towers that would not be directly be providing motive power but like wind turbines would produce electrical energy to charge batteries.
Yes, I see.
However, wind turbines of any form need to be anchored against the wind before they can transform the wind’s energy into rotations.
A ship without the turbine, advancing against the wind, will indeed be pushed back; with the turbine, the back-push will be higher. The earned rotational energy can just be used to compensate for the back-push due to the turbine… minus the losses, it is not a perpetual motion.
Not trying to deviate the thread but I just had a flashback to around '80. There was a group in the NE that tried to transport containers coastwise with sail vessels. I worked with one of the captains from that project in the early '80s.
OK, I looked at the Flettner system mentioned earlier in the thread. The towers I had in mind are columns that transfer energy through vibration. The Vortex Bladeless developers describe how they work:
‘When wind passes one of the cylindrical turbines, it shears off the downwind side of the cylinder in a spinning whirlpool or vortex. That vortex then exerts force on the cylinder causing it to vibrate.’
This type of generator produces less drag than a conventional turbine but is also less efficient so not a viable solution either. They would still produce enough drag to negate any energy production. The conventional plant would have to work harder to compensate. I don’t see harnessing wind energy as sole system of propulsion for commercial scale vessels feasible unless we’re prepared to slow our pace of life and go back to using sails a la 1850’s
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There’s no reason to assume that is the case. A sail boat sailing upwind is not perpetual motion.
The situation is the same. The sail of a sail boat is acting as a foil, as is the blade of turbine. The sail is generating lift, so is blade,
In both cases the red vector would be the direction of the foil, a sail in one case and a turbine blade in the other.
There was a Swede who experimented with wind turbine powered propellers. It apparently worked just fine, but had some serious practical problems attached. The stored energy in the turbine meant that the whole system was just a mechanical failure away from disaster, and he viewed it as unsafe. He used a car spindle and drum brake, and IIRC it was an instance of losing control of the turbine speed that led him to abandon the project.
It’s been a very long time since I read about it, and I remember neither his name nor enough pertinent detail to find more about it. I would be really grateful if someone could point me in the right direction.
the new AC foiling boats are doing 50kts in 20 true, but wouldnt do that made from steel nor foiling.
So after Containerization in the last 100 years what else has shipping innovated?
Why don’t you stop trolling and do some simple research to answer your own question?
Look to the US patent office for your answer. Look at Class 114 and the large number of sub classes lthat list patents and applications for ocean shipping.
Class 440 (marine propulsion) may be interesting if your question is more than just argumentative trolling.
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Blackford who by 2010 had built a hydrofoil catamaran vessel driven by a single, three-bladed horizontal-axis windmill mounted to the top of a mast and uses mechanical linkage to drive the propeller. Sailing along the North American east coast, the vessel achieved a speed of eight knots sailing into the wind and 12 knots sailing with the wind.
The turbine (windmill?) blades themselves are not traveling directly upwind even when the vessel itself is.
Thanks, those classes appear to be the breakdowns of divisions that you can submit under?
Of course are a huge number or applications for widgets to do something like any other industry.
As for innovation I stand by my comment that there is very little in Shipping.
Old ships can do what new ones can in most cases.
The discussion was about sailing directly into the wind; not about tacking with the therefore extended distance and reduced VMG. When sailing into headwind, the triangle of forces becomes just a straight line…
The modern racing sailboats are just fabulous. Finally they are just a reduced hull with rig, sails, rudder and keel (or foils), with space for a small crew; without another utility than speed.
With a sail boat, yes, foil and vessel direction is the same. With a boat equipped with a wind turbine no, the blade of the turbine is traveling at right angles to vessel direction.
In this diagram the red vector would be blade velocity. It’s going to be at right angles to vessel direction.
The limit on a sailboat is when the air foil stalls. The blade of a wind turbine is not going to be even close to stalling when the vessel is moving dead upwind.
Modern sailing instruments work this out for you. Brooks and Gatehouse were one of the first on the scene in the 70’s but the relentless advances in electronics have resulted in much more sophisticated systems.
Weather routing software has provided a leap forward for long distance ocean sailboat racing and has made it easier to beat established records. Some old timers complain that foiling technology has transformed America’s cup style racing into something resembling NASCAR but more people can relate to it. Corporate sponsors want audiences so the 50 kt boats are here to stay. No 12 meter ever pitchpoled in 20 kts of wind and launched the crew up into the air.
Looking for something more like this:
It may be exciting but I don’t see that being scalable to commercial applications for quite some time; that’s a tiny amount of lift per turbine. We may well figure out anti-gravity or negative ion propulsion and make wind turbines look quaint before they become viable for ship propulsion.
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All this talk of fascinating wind-powered ships gets us nowhere unless we understand why we are doing it in the first place. My view is that ultimately the whole impetus is based on a false premise; that the world is warming catastrophically and we must reduce CO2 emissions drastically to save the world.
No so-called renewable form of energy is cost free. It is invariable more expensive than tried and true energy sources that are much more energy intensive. If this remains true there’s no reason to move to renewables other than saving the world. It is up to the proponents to demonstrate that not only is the world in such danger and needs saving, but that the cure is actually possible and feasible, and that the damage skyrocketing costs will cause in the interim is worth the pain.
The world is not in danger from infinitesimal changes in the temperature. It does not need saving, especially by those with a religious-like zeal of born again true believers. The pain already inflicted on us is astronomical and - here’s the bit the zealots never, ever answer - that pain falls now on the most disadvantaged of our societies, the poor.
Is it worth it? I say no.
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if the slowdown in the global economy due to the wuhan virus has not stopped global warming from reduced emissions then the blame that man is causing it is getting very weak.
Perhaps the fact that man can doing something about it is not really true?
Of course the connection between Co2 and global warming has always been tenuous at best.
Should we pollute less, yes for sure.
Should we power the world with renewables instead of finite resources, yes sure.
( Sailign must be one of the most plastic polluting industries on the planet)
When it’s cost effective, not before. Also, regarding ‘finite resources’, we must remind ourselves that confirmed reserves of oil, for example, increase year on year. They don’t deplete … yet. The magic of capitalism at work.
Some history:
15 years after Edwin Drake drilled the first successful oil well in 1859, a Pennsylvania geologist was saying the United States would run out of oil by 1878. In 1908, the US Geological Survey said we’d exhaust our domestic oil reserves by 1927; in 1939, it moved petroleum doomsday to 1952. I could go on.