'Sailing'?? Directly to Windward

Discussion in 'Boat Design' started by brian eiland, Apr 19, 2009.

  1. SpiritAmsterdam
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    SpiritAmsterdam Junior Member

    You are completely correct in your statment here. That is exactly why we are going electrical.


    We plan to build 2 halbach motors for both rear wheels. The generator already has an efficiency of 92%/94% so optimizing this is not a top priority yet. But it will probably be replaced aswell in the next few years.
     
  2. SpiritAmsterdam
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    SpiritAmsterdam Junior Member

    Interesting ideas. The world could certainly benefit from a project like this. And it looks like the idea has sparked some interest from others in this forum.
     
  3. P Flados
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    P Flados Senior Member

    Storage is just about the biggest pain in any discussion of improvements.

    If you are a small shop owner looking for a shop air source, I would envision a couple of large but normal low pressure tanks. In addition, you would have a small bank of high pressure bottles. About the size of oxygen bottles on a normal oxy-acetylene rig used for a cutting torch or slightly larger.

    When your low pressure storage is fully charged, the computer stops running the low pressure compressor and starts running a smaller volume but much higher pressure compressor (2500 psig max or so) to charge the "reserve bank"

    During your business day, the initial use is coming from the low pressure storage. If the wind is blowing, the computer shifts back to low pressure compressor mode. Depending on air use and outside wind, you may or may not keep up. More limiting is lots of air use and/or no wind. In this case, when the low pressure tanks get to minimum, a regulated supply from the high pressure tanks starts delivering air.

    Driving the low pressure compressor is much more efficient, but the high pressure tanks can store much more total energy. The real beauty of this scheme is that the computer that you need for turbine control can also monitor and regulate storage equipment. That plus the electric drive allows use of off the shelf compressors if you can tolerate their efficiency.

    If you are talking about boating needs where you are looking for stored energy for propulsion, you would probably go with non-metallic high pressure storage and high efficiency / high pressure air motors that drive props. Unless you invest in a lot of air tanks, I am not sure you will get much range if you use stored only. If your turbine is big enough, it can be supplying an electric drive unit while you are using storage just to boost speed.

    For the live aboard boaters, the available electricity at anchor is probably a bigger plus. If you are not moving any time soon, your high pressure air storage can be put back into electricity on the calm days.
     
  4. P Flados
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    P Flados Senior Member

    Yeah, but it all hinges around some smart kids getting together, building wind powered carts, and then using what they learned to fill in the gaps that some "old guy" dreamer comes up with.

    Seeing the opportunities does not enable a person to develop the computer controls that allow a wind turbine automatically and efficiently put the energy where it is needed.

    Back when I was in college, there were lots of little projects where a team of kids learn some really neat stuff, However it usually did not go anywhere because the potential real uses were never followed up on. The Internet has a real potential to change that.

    Engineers and scientist typically drool at the though of having their ideas contribute to something that makes life better for everyone or possibly even just a segment of society. For many, just being a part of something real would be plenty of reward, and we would be content even if any financial reward ended up with the guy that actually made it work.

    I actually kind of resent when people scramble to patent little pieces of something and in the end just slow down things like getting wind power in a position to deliver on making life better for the entire world. Many patents end up with the first guy that happened to push through the paperwork on an idea that many would have been independently arrived at. Patents should be reserved mostly for the cases where a real innovation was achieve through a long and tedious development with no help from any collective community.
     
  5. A.T.
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    A.T. Junior Member

    They had some tests already, and unofficially came close to 2x windspeed, directly upwind:

    http://fasterthanthewind.wordpress.com/2012/05/20/first-upwind-speed-test-photos/

    The first official attempts under NALSA supervision are this weekend.
     
  6. A.T.
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    A.T. Junior Member

  7. A.T.
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    A.T. Junior Member

    NALSA confirms directly upwind record of 2.1 windspeed:
    http://www.nalsa.org/
     
  8. P Flados
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    P Flados Senior Member

    Thanks Blackbird team

    To all of those who just can not deal with reality because "it does not seem right", please take note that science is real and that people that do believe in physics might actually know what they are doing.
     
  9. High Tacker
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    High Tacker Junior Member

    Right on! Straight into the wind at twice the speed of the true wind! Of course, being on land and on wheels is vastly different from a boat pushing water aside, but we were able, in boats, to do 55% of the true wind speed, straight into it, in the 1980s, and most yachties still believe it to be impossible to sail straight into the wind at all. Well, after all, most yachties aren't scientists, are just sportsmen.
     
  10. ThinAirDesigns
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    ThinAirDesigns Senior Member

    I would love to hear just a brief description of the sails you were using on these boats in the '80s that allowed you to progress straight into the wind (at any speed).

    Please share.

    Thanks
    JB
     
  11. Jeremy Harris
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    Jeremy Harris Senior Member

    It was a catamaran fitted with a wind turbine rig, rather than sails - there's posts and pictures of it earlier in this thread, or you can go to his website: http://www.damsl.com/ and click on the "wind turbine rig" link.
     
  12. ThinAirDesigns
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    ThinAirDesigns Senior Member

    Thanks Jeremy -- I am familiar with that one, but from his description was not sure (and am still not sure) if that is the boat he is talking about or some other.

    JB
     
  13. kerosene
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    kerosene Senior Member

    it is the same one. He has shared his 1st hand experiences here on this or another thread.

    H
     
  14. ThinAirDesigns
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    ThinAirDesigns Senior Member

    Cool, Thanks.

    JB
     

  15. High Tacker
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    High Tacker Junior Member

    I see that Jeremy and Kerosene are still on the ball. Thanks guys, for pointing to my long-winded explanation at www.damsl.com

    But Jeremy, you describe it as with "a wind turbine rig rather than sails", so I will point out here that the blades on a wind turbine ARE sails and the whole rig, whether one- or two- or three-bladed or more, constitutes a rotary sailing rig, and it drives a prop, a rotary hydrofoil, in essence a rotary keel, accomplishing a three-dimensional continuous spiral tack, the resultant of which is a straight line upwind, in contrast to the discontinuous, two-dimensional zig-zag tack of a conventional sailboat.

    The rotary sailing rig has the mechanical advantage of a screw which amounts to taking the mechanical advantage of an inclined plane, a ramp, which is all the mechanical advantage a conventional sailboat has, a static sail pushing a static keel up a ramp, so, taking that ramp and twisting it into a spiral. Thus, a rotary sailing rig, not static, hence the name damsl, which is sailorese for dynamic sail. Orginally I spelled it d'am's'l, like mains'l, fo'c's'le, etc., but then deleted the apostrophes. And it's pronounced the same as damsel, so, a feminine flavor appropriate to high-maintenance beings such as boats.

    There have been several similar boats. The best I know of was Jim Bates's second turbine boat "Tango" in Whangarei, New Zealand, which is where my boat is now, and she's for sale, by the way, and with an A-frame rig and furling cloth sails replacing the turbine, with which we had problems, not with the basic idea, which I still consider to be very viable, but simply because we tried to get too fancy with hydraulic drive so that we could drive two props, and also because the builder of the turbine took some shortcuts, departures from the design. But the main problem was that I ran out of money and decided, in the interest of resale value, to do something simpler, cheaper, and more understandable to the average sailor.

    Her original name was Revolution, but I always thought that name was a bit hackneyed, and, anyhow, there's no longer anything revolving, so changed the name to Catbird Suite.

    There's another turbine boat, apparently quite similar, named Revelation, which is a good name, well, to me at least, the whole idea beats hell out that chapter by the same name in the so-called Bible. I mean, sailors have believed for thousands of years that it would be impossible to sail straight upwind, so it's one helluva revelation when you figure out how to do it. Of course, for even more thousands of years, they thought you couldn't go to windward at all, so the first Europeans who did it, picking it up from Arab dhows with lateen rigs, those first European sailors would not do it within sight of any strangers for fear of being branded as witches.

    My nephew in New Orleans, in his early teens, following the design of my first little models, built a little turbine boat as his school science fair project, had a tank of water with a big fan at one end, and his little boat of course sailed straight for the fan, so he won, then won the state fair, then the southeast regional fair, and placed second in the U.S. national science fair. At every stage, physics professors who were judges were shocked in disbelief, and one of them insisted on taking the boat apart looking for a secret motor. Another of them argued that the fan was imparting a spiral motion to the air and thus the boat was taking the wind from the side, not from straight ahead. I encountered the same kind of nonsense when I was building such little models while in graduate school in Florida, but this is getting too long here for more stories of dogmatic professors. See www.damsl.com

    Anyhow, with the hydraulic drive, we couldn't sail in anything less than about 7 knots of wind, whereas Bates's boat would begin sailing, straight into it, at 2 knots, with a speed of 1.1 knots. Our turbine was supposed to have been built to his design. His boat was a 40-ft cat, with a 35-ft diameter, 3-bladed turbine driving a 3-ft diameter prop, mechanical drive with the prop just aft of the bottom of the mast.

    I've got some pics of Bates's boat in storage in the U.S. and will get to them someday and post them on this site.
     
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