Wind turbine powered boat Design

If this is to be a wood boat and with all the different forces acting upon the mast, the anchoring point for the mast is going to need glu-lam beams not just lumber. Everything about this boat spells HEAVY to me and with minimal power that means very slow.

 

This could be taken two ways:
Either that the boat will use a windmill for "sail" propulsion, and electric motors in port. Or that the windmill charges batteries and the boat is actually a powerboat.

If the latter is true then that may change peoples opinions of the idea

Richard Woods

 

I assumed this is an electric boat (catamaran) with batteries charged by a wind turbine. The hard part is providing a good stable platform that won't break the turbine. Light weight hulls might be counterproductive. Lead batteries might be a benefit damping higher frequency motion. I would want the stiffest lightest blades possible on the turbine and a carbon fiber 'mast'. Narrow long and tall catamaran hulls for soft motion and no hull slap. Wide overall beam might be good to try and make the role rate the same port to starboard as fore-aft. The idea being to make the motion control the same in all directions thus easier.

The brilliance of this is it will provide many times as much press as they could buy for the same money, and it's portable.

 

If you google for this 'boat powered by wind turbine'. There are a number of boats shown. Can it work yes.
Will it help you sell wind turbines....NO
As someone who just spent a number of years working in the wind turbine industry if you want people to buy your turbine, build a prototype, have it operate at over 99% availability for a few years! then customers will come knocking on your door. If you can't afford that, good luck going bankrupt unless you can sell your technology (that needs to be fully patent protected) to somebody with very deep pockets.
The reality of the wind industry is that unless you have hundreds of million dollars to spend, and don't need a return for 7-9 years, them you are pissing in the wind....sorry
PM me if you want more information

 

I think that bit is basically doomed to fail. The mill, if it is a HAWT, has to operate like a sail. It would run skewed to the wind and produce both lift and drag. The lift might not seem great, but there are no mechanical losses to contend with. Starting with the prop's 25% loss for a slow boat such as this would be, add another 20% for conversions and some more for shafting. A bit of induced drag is looking like a fair tradeoff. So basically, it is a motor sailor, some sail, some shaft power, with the ability to adjust the split via torquing.

I wish him good luck with the torquing system and mast structure. Those are large economic drivers on land. At sea, you will have it even worse since mass is a performance penalty. So this is going to want to run at a higher blockage ratio than on land based turbines. Maybe the skew will accomplish that for them. IIRC, performance decays with the cube of the skew angle, so no huge angles, but the first 10 degrees only cost you 5%.

 

I too am contemplating the incorporation of a wind turbine into a boat. I am a principal in a company, Inerjy, that has developed and manufactures a pretty suitable turbine for the application. A lot of very insightful comments have been made here and I would like to join the dialogue but wonder if this thread is a suitable place as my project has its own intentions that may likely vary from the OP's and I don't want to hijack it...

 

Hi Rainmaking, and welcome to the forum. It is interesting to see the wide variety of comments and assumptions that have abounded so far in response to the original poster's proposal. We don't know what he is contemplating in any detail with regards to the type of wind generator (conventional or some new technology) or the method of propulsion, whether direct (to a propulsor) or indirect (through storage batteries). And since he has not responded yet to the comments, and until we know more about his project, everything said so far is merely guesswork.

I'd say feel free to comment here if you have something to add, but if you want feedback on your system you are welcome to start a new thread.

Eric

 

Wind Turbine boat power: Photos and videos

I have myself done quite a lot of research on Wind Turbine powered boats.
I don't favour simply fitting a land type windturbine on a boat. I believe the best system
is to use a slow rotating turbine with many blades. I have had much success with this configuration. It is much more user friendly than mounting an enormous nearly supersonic speed land turbine on a boat. In fact using my system the turbine can be of very small diameter and still be effective, also there are no gyroscopic effects and it is not dangerous - please see the link "Model Gallery" on my website which is at : http://www.sailwings.net/rotaryhome.html there are also numerous videos there to view.

 

Notice folks one post total by the OP on New Years Day mind you... I smell a troll