so why doesnt it work?

well this is going well ....they fly back to france at any excuse like christmas/the tooth /give the firiendfriend one ...etc revisit old places they have been before like Golapogos /south american mountains/quick lecture in middle east .....bit of a millionares trip around the world if you ask me .....sent me a newsletter ..great in french !!!

 

Had to laugh ...prop drive is via toothed belt ...BUT they had to get the engineers in from a commercial ship to help change them ........now off they go across the pacific ....hope the rubber bands dont break......

 

Hope someone is reading this ......I assume they are going through the Suez canal eventually ......what will be funny is when they go through the Straights of Hermuz at 4 kts !!!! Easy target for pirates and some millionares on board ...perhaps this is why it is not possible ... I recently had a container shipped to me from singapore ...2 km outside singapore it turned off its transponder and went at 25 kts ...transponder on again when it entered the Med ....oh sorry they are millionares no doubt will be accompanied by a gunboat or two...

Laughed today " some fishermen came alongside ..we gave them a brochure " what they really wanted was another watch like were handed out in the Galapogos ....

 

"could just about do away with any sort of backup generator, just regeneration under sail."


Since generating props will absorb more power than a bucket dragged of the same diameter , these "captains" must either be in a high wind area , or delight in sailing a few K slower.

FF

 

elec / diesel

Unfortunately the "problem" with electric is that it is competing against petroleum which is a phenomenal energy source. If petroleum didn't have so much chug-per-jug, we would have been using electric drives years ago in cars, boats, etc. My take is that, as a society, we should use petroleum for those things that we couldn't possibly do any other way like flying planes and making epoxy. We should have far fewer planes, more electric trains, fewer cars, and get ready to go slower, and then suddenly hybrid / solar / wind assisted boats would start looking real feasible.

 

We should have far fewer planes, more electric trains, fewer cars, and get ready to go slower,

Ask your grandaddy , going by horse had its problems too, imagine any large city with 30,000 lbs of horse manuer to remove , PER HOUR!

FF

 

I don't have to go back to Granddaddy, my dad remembered horse drawn postal and milk trucks. So now that I have revealed my advanced age, I can say that I definitely don't glorify the past: 1950's American Iron often needed a ring-and-valve job after 30K miles and now we get incensed if a car engine breaks down before 100K. All I'm saying is give grease a chance..... no wait, that is a different song. All I am saying is that we should allocate our resources in a slightly smarter way: Displacement boats are less weight-sensitive than trains, which are less weight-sensitive than cars, which are less weight-sensitive than airplanes. We should save the good-stuff for when we need to go 800 miles in a hurry, and should radically readjust our expectations on other activities. BTW some chemists will tell you that we shouldn't be burning petroleum at all: those glorious long-chain hydrocarbons are just too useful for making things.....

 

FWIW, the ONLY thing that makes electric less attractive than oil is energy storage.

The electric motor is more powerful, more efficient, quieter and simpler than any engine. An average bargain-basement motor is 80% efficient, which is twice as good as any internal combustion in use.

Right now, you can see video of a Wrightspeed X1 which is much faster than almost any car you can drive on the street in 0-60 mph times. 100 miles range, but with a car like that you're probably gonna want to get out before you get that far anyway. If you don't need range, you should be able to make a boat which is every bit as snappy, as long as you have a really big bank account.

So as long as you can find batteries that will do what you need and are willing to pay for them, electrics are fine.

Next in line is the controllers, those could stand some improvement. In an AC application they can cost as much as or even more than the motor. That said, it's a fairly mature technology and available in any practical size.


Myths:
Battery recycling of lead-acid batteries is not eco-friendly. False. If batteries are disposed of in a landfill then they're horrible. If they get recycled, then 100% of every part gets made into new batteries. That includes the metals, the plastics, the acid, everything. There is no maximum allowable percentage of recycled materials that works the way paper has. The way I understand it, currently the modern battery formulations have some necessary waste in recycling so while they are better performing they are not as green.

Generating props. That's perpetual motion. Any time you have a system that powers itself, it won't work. Sailboat hulls are very slick, and a generating impeller would multiply the drag of the hull several times. You would be better off using solar panels or a wind generator if you're not under sail.

 

Wrong on all counts. LOL, this is what is wrong with people give in to wishful thinking and grasp at a promising single solution but don't look beyond the immediate issue to consider the total problems. At debate here is where you draw the energy box boundary. Much too narrow for real world second law matters. Like riding a titanium bike to save energy but not counting the energy cost to make the bike.

More powerful...NOT! 5kW is 5kW regardless of how it is produced, and if you consider zero RPM torque, steam and hydraulic has is way over magnetic flux. More efficient in power conversion at low speed also.

More efficient...LoL, not by half. Where do you think electric power comes from? It is produced by other sources like ICEs or steam plants. And don't even start me on solar cells where you have to strip mine half of Bolivia to get anywhere near the required generation capability....

Quieter...Have you ever stood next to a high amperage variable frequency DC-AC generator? Or a wind generator for that matter.

Simplier...Again, have you ever considered a high amperage variable frequency generator? Or the amount of copper that needs to be mined for a 5 MW generator and how much fuel that will take?

Really though...electric has certian advantages...and certian problems. It is not a win all power source. It has sustainability and pollution issues like any other power source. What is needed is a total solution for the way ahead...and so ICEs will be the most efficient solution for quite some time. I really hope monofuel fuel cells come into thier own soon, but I expect to be well retired before that happens.

 

If today's electric solution do not spread that fast, the cause could be that actual technology proposed is not yet the good one, far too iimperfect, but this may change very fast with breakthrough like this :

http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=338
http://www.nanospireinc.com/Technology___IP.html
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Rosemary_Ainslie
These heat producers perfectly drive thermoacoustic and sterling engines that require very low quantities of exotic and expensive materials

Battery will also be a problem of the past with well designed Emotors
http://pesn.com/2011/02/27/9501773_Aviso_Ponders_Open_Sourcing_Self-Running_EV_Tech/

Of course, all these smart solutions are just pure phantasm that will stay in your wet dreams, as their emergence implies a total reconstruction of our businesses and scientific models, a change that the "all is ok like this" Astroturfers will help us to forget as fast as possible... OU bien ?

 

The "energy box boundary" is what's in the vehicle and what's not in the vehicle. So how much cleaner is it to strip mine iron compared to copper? And considering that an AC induction motor has one moving part, what exactly is it that wears out? Grease the bearings every so often and you're good.

Not talking about kW ratings. That bugs me too, where people seem to think that a 5 kW electric motor is somehow more powerful than a 5kW gasoline engine. I'm talking power per unit volume of the motor/engine, or power per unit weight if you aren't using the cheap stationary motors.

You need to take another look at how much energy it takes to create a gallon of gasoline. If you look at gasoline prices and compare that to crude oil prices per barrel, it seems to take 3-5 gallons of crude to create one gallon of gasoline. The only difference between oil and coal or some other source is that it comes out of a hole in a fluid form rather than being scooped out into a truck.

A power plant can run much more cleanly and efficiently than a 25 hp outboard. Not only that, the pollution created can be captured and neutralized in ways that would not be practical on a small mobile application.

Again though, what matters is what's in the boat and how much it costs to fill it. Motors and controllers for variable speed drives are lower production right now so they cost a bit, but the biggest cost is batteries, like I was saying before. The motor/controller generally costs 2-3 times the pack price, but the pack needs to be replaced every few years. The motor and controller can last decades with continuous industrial use with little or no maintenance. Do that with any internal combustion engine.

And as far as that goes, they print most solar cells right onto regular window glass now.

Yes, both of those. I've seen and ridden in a few homemade electric cars, and while the low speed circuit can sing the overall operation at a significant speed is much, much quieter than any gas engine. Maybe you haven't heard that they're making a requirement that electric vehicles have noise generators so blind people don't step out in front of them?

And standing under a modern wind generator, you can barely hear it. I'm talking one of these:



The farm I saw, the blades are shipped in 3 sections, the tip of which is longer than the extra-long truck that ships it. You can barely hear it turn at full speed. The base of those towers is 20-25 feet in diameter in my guess. I could easily park 2 cars inside the circle if the door were big enough to fit them. Each blade on those is more than twice the length of a big semi truck.

Edit: Each blade is 148 feet long. The blade is approximately 10 feet in diameter at the root. There are pictures of 3 men standing side by side inside the blade root at the Siemens plant. The hub looks to be 12-15 feet in diameter, so that puts the whole mill in excess of 300 feet diameter. 1.5 MW each, for the model I found on the net.

I also used to help install 300 hp 3-phase pumps for agricultural use. You can get a noisy winding, and in some cases one brand tends to me noisier than another from quality control issues. But if you're comparing even those to an internal combustion engine of the same power and same duty cycle, you either have really good exhaust on the engine or the motor is much quieter.

Another thing to consider is that if you start with a fairly quiet electric motor, it probably won't get any louder over its entire lifespan. An internal combustion engine needs a muffler to make it even remotely tolerable to be around, and those rust through and need to be replaced.

Yes. Consider the number of useful hours before the machine wears out. 10 engines = 1 electric motor. Consider that once you have the motor and the VFD, you generally have it for decades. Aside of efficiency, there's no real reason that a motor made by Nikola Tesla wouldn't still be useful today. Very few moving parts.

There is no solution that solves every problem. I'm not in any way saying that electric motors will replace everything or even most things. The subject of the thread is, "so why doesn't it work?" The why is batteries. Everything else is something that could nicely fit somebody's bill for return on investment.

 

There won't be any event that suddenly causes people to stop using whatever they were using and only use electric. Right now a few people are making small boats and fooling around with them. As technology improves, the boats will be used for longer and longer ranges. At some point they may become mainstream, but as conservative as boaters seem to be none of us will probably see the day when more than half of recreational boats are electric.

 

They are, and will ever be,

the best example to prove the hybrid idea wrong. A premature dream has shown how extremely premature it really is at present.

Never came close to a average sailboats speed. Never accomplished a single leg without major problems. Never provided proof of a single aspect of the concept to be valid.

Lets hope they do it through the "Somali straits"; BECAUSE WE HOPE EVERY SAILOR DOES IT !

Then lets see, if they make it home without a tug........

What a senseless journey.

 

I think the 5kw electric versus 5kw si or ci engine percieved difference comes from is due to the torque curve of an electric motor.
The area under the curve ( as drag racers would refer to it ) has a vastly bigger area so in a drag race the 5kw electric would beat a 5kw piston engine.

Now if it were a bulldozer then 5kw is 5 kw just like a boat

( dont forget kw is rate of work, you need the torque reading to compare as well.)

So I can walk down the marina carrying a gallon of fuel and put it in my piston engine that is less than 50% efficient and travel far further than if I carried down any other fuel source. I guess when that changes so will my engine

 

Hows your geography?

The Straits of Humez are in the Persian Gulf not the red sea
Your container went from Singapore to the Med to get to Austraila?
via both canals?