The fun concept

Sail boat with water turbine and batteries. When wind blow water turbine charge the batteries, and when no wind the batteries drive water turbine who act as propeler. The batteries take place in a vertical kill.

 

excuse me, (do not offend)
sounds like somebody revamped again the perpetual motor theory....
think it can barely work properly in the outer space.
"the sum of the kinetic + potential energy is a constant" remember? so, what about friction? (friction=speed loss) may that be used as a complement to charge batteries while sailing? ok, but do not use while regatta time, surely that will drown you to the last 2 places of the sheet... a solar panel will do the job in a preety much cleaner way.

 

If I remember it right, the Axiom, used by the Custeau Foundation, works with a power generating turbine, although it is not its main source of power...

 

Only a part of enrgy that come from wind will be use for charge the bateruies.For example if it is not charging the speed of yaht will be 20knt, if it appear a charging the speed will fall and will be 12 ore even small. So the energy that use to compensate the friction at 20 knt will charge the bateries. For long regatts as regatt round the world this will be more appropriate than anny other system.
Dimitar

 

A simplistic look at this would try and see if such a system would get you to your destination faster than conventional sailing. First pass guess would be that the distance reduction while charging batteries would not be made up by the distance gained under battery power.

One feature displacement boats is wavemaking, leading a "hull speed" (please don't start this thread again) indicating an approx speed above which a lot more drive power is needed. Once you are in this speed range, excess wind power that would otherwise be wasted trying to go a tiny bit faster could possibly be channeled into battery charging.

There is a lot of nonliniarty involved, so simple calculations would be very unlikely to yield valid results.

Brent

 

Your "Turbine" is just another version of a prop with an alternator and as for the amount of energy you will gain; you will need to charge the batteries for 3 days to give an hours motoring under electric motor.

Nice idea