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Wind Powered Freighters Return
thatoneguyfromphoeni writes "It appears that sails could return to the ocean's freighters soon. Newsweek is reporting on a technology to assist with cross-ocean travel. From the article: 'SkySails' system consists of an enormous towing kite and navigation software that can map the best route between two points for maximum wind efficiency. In development for more than four years, the system costs from roughly $380,000 to $3.2 million, depending on the size of the ship it's pulling. SkySails claims it will save one third of fuel costs.'"
Scientists have been puzzling over the best route between 2 points for centuries, but the math has been too difficult.
During the oil crisis in the early 80's they worked on this. I'm fairly sure one company did add sails to a ship or two and did see a reduction in fuel consumption.
Also Popular Mechanics ran an article on this like 4 months ago. In fact it was on the cover of that issue.
The artist's conception picture in the article shows the bow as the point of attachment for the parasail. I suspect that would make steering much more difficult, compared to hooking the parawing near the center of mass for the ship.
TFA doesn't seem to say, I'd imagine that thing would have to be absolutely huge if, as they say, it can pull a full-sized ship. I'd like to see some details on deployment as well, I imagine a huge thing like that would be a bit tricky to handle in any kind of useful wind, when trying to get it launched. Great idea though - I've often wondered if wind-assist wouldn't be a useful idea on ships, but I had in mind more traditional masts and sails with a bit of automation, this is a lot simpler, and therefore presumably cheaper and more reliable.
Oh no... it's the future.
...the course of a *different* route than if the ship is entirely under power; ergo, use the sails and you need to chart a different, likely less direct, course for the ship. I wonder what the average increase in distance for a route is?
Likely this will still have value even if just used when the wind is positioned conveniently. Certain legs of round trips are certainly likely to benefit greatly from sail power.
Very cool. I'd certainly love to see that out on the ocean.
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Actually, this is not just a weird idea, but this is already in use by Beluga, an ocean carrier from Bremen/Germany.
(Funny that the image whose words I have to type in right now says 'seaport' (-: )
Hey, didn't KevinCostner's boat in Water World have one of these?
Sorry, this is the best I could find. I'm just not that good with this Google thing. I was looking for a picture, but FTL:
Rising fuel prices during the 1970s prompted the development of a new technology that used sails shaped like aircraft wings turned on end to take some of the burden off the engines and save fuel. Slightly curved to form a wing shape, these sails were attached to a mast that could pivot and locate the best angle for the sail to catch the wind. Once the computers set the mast at the best angle to the wind, the sail created the same "lifting" force that an airplane's wing generates, except that the force pushed the ship along the water. However, this system did not always prove to be efficient for extremely large vessels. I thought what I saw was that the mast itself was a rigid aerodynamic sail.
What?
One of the things I was looking forward too as gas/oil prices skyrocketing was a decrease in offshore manufacturing. Economics and exploitation of slave labor may say that it's cheaper to manufacture something and then send it 2,000 miles over ship rather than manufacture locally, that entire equation depends on cheap oil.
Stuff like this will save oil and carbon outputs, but really just allows the same wasteful economic system. I have mixed emotions.
Ahh, the military will probably ban them b/c it disrupts their radars.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
The early helicopter designer Anton Flettner made an interesting attempt in the '20s to harness wind power for ocean travel. The Flettner rotorship Bruckau used two tall, rotating cylinders to harness the Magnus Effect. It worked, but unfortunately turned out to be less efficient than normal propulsion.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Here is a video from their site. This is obviously a prototype, so they have a LOT of scaling to do. Plus, the only time you see the boat (yes, I said boat, not ship) moving with any significant speed, you can't see the rear, so it's safe to assume that its engine is assisting.
I heard from a friend that it takes ~40 gallons of fuel to move one of those big cruise ships. This would be a great idea for recreational ships in terms of fuel savings. Not only that, it would be a great idea in terms of the novelty. People would think it's neat to ride on a cruise ship pulled by a huge kite. Who knows? Maybe someone will find a way to take people up in the kite (for a fee). Maybe not. That would be dangerous.
Sailboats tend to need keels if they plan on sailing in any direction other than directly downwind.
I'm not just mentioning this as another thing to factor into the cost of retrofitting ships; there is also the consideration of the added draft the ship needs in port in order to avoid running aground.
I see this as a potential problem for using sails, since ports may need to further dredge their channels and inlets in order to allow larger sailing craft to load and unload their cargo. Will they still consider this cost-effective?
Actually I'd like to see an idea "Future" magazine did a couple decades back. They basically had the boat supported and driven by large spinning wheels. The idea was of reducing drag by having only a small amount in contact with the water. The boat would also go faster. The other idea is one I believe popular science showed a couple years back. Basically you had a wing flying on a cushion of air (not a hovercraft)*. I believe the russians built a prototype.
*A ground-effect plane as it were.
the amount of tension on the parawing cable would scare the crap out of me, especially if I had to deal with that thing in/prior to bad weather.
Wow, this is really cool. Maybe in a few years nanotech will be far enough along to allow for wires that have amazing tensile strengths and light wieght to pput a sail all the way up into the Jet Stream. It may sound far fetched and probably is, but jeez that could really get a ship zinging along...
Cool Stuff.
Make the world better. Quit hating.
Shiver me timbers!
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." - Shepard Book Quoting Malcolm Reynolds
This was on the Discovery Channel last year.
What is it with the editors? Are they watching re-runs now?
So what if someone patented ideas revolving around this? There needs to be some very innovative design and engineering going on in order to easily, safely, and efficiently use an unmasted sail to move such a large ship.
It would be shocking if the USTPO awarded a patent revolving around the basic idea of moving a ship via a wind sail. But it wouldn't be surprising if many patents were awarded for the specific construction, deployment, recovery, and anchoring mechanisms.
There are many aspects of this that may be new, innovative, and non-obvious.
Please consider giving engineers some credit for innovative work. This is not patenting the FAT file system directory structure - it's a bit harder than that.
Maybe, but the real reason sailing ships went out of use wasn't the cost of transporting the cargo. Remember that sailing ships didn't need space for engines or fuel; and, by the end of the 19th century they were sailed by very small crews. They were always the cheapest way to get cargo from one point to another. What killed them was the unreliability of their passage times: In order to gurarantee a steady supply of a commodity you had to have big wharehouses at each end. Steamships eliminated the wharehouses so the end-to-end cost was less. Just in time inventory anybody?
"navigation software that can map the best route between two points for maximum wind efficiency"
So yeah Jeff, I was the ultimate cause for the latest oil spill, but anyone could have done it. I forgot to put an upper cap on the windspeed, and damned if the ship didn't go cruising straight into that last hurricane.
God spoke to me.
A) This story was not about a patent.
B) I would say retrofitting a cargo ship with a sail in tandem with a computer system that can direct the sail mast to the correct angle to generate the most power from the available wind, dependent upon while altering the ships course, sounds pretty novel to me.
C) If you had RTFA, you would discover this is not some SCO'ish trying to build a patent porfolio, but a company that has achieved a sale of their first sail.
D) This is a German based company, so I would expect they would be patenting in the EU before the US.
In the future, if you wish to make baseless suppositions about articles, I request you post AC so I can filter you out like the other flametrolls. Or go read digg with all the other trend chasers.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
The $3.2 million package includes a skull and crossbones emblazoned on the main sail, a crow's nest with animatronic gulls, and the main computer speech recognition and playback system with "Pirate Speak"(tm). Now, captains of all ages can say "Argh, hoist the main sail" with a confirmation voice prompt of "Aye, captain! We'ra hoistin'!"
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.. cross the strings!
from the sound of it, it's only designed to be used when the ship is heading downwind, I can't imagine a 1000' long tanker trying to tack into the wind.
------ Work is so much easier when you don't
"...I imagine a huge thing like that would be a bit tricky to handle in any kind of useful wind, when trying to get it launched..."
Good point.
My best guess is to make the sail inflatable, and fill it with helium. That at least gets it up and in the right shape. Orientation is yet another problem.
.....and a bottle of rum!
I think that is what the former captain of the Exxon Valdez was singing the minute before he ran aground.
-----
Sig Sauer
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
The superstructure on those ships sticks a mile into the sky (ok so I exagerate a bit). There's an advantage to having the bridge high enough so you can see the whole ship and everything around it. Everything else can be much closer to the deck. Given that the wind load increases with the square of the velocity, the help you get from a trailing wind is more than cancelled by the extra drag you get in a head wind.
They've done wonderful things to make the hulls energy efficient. I'll bet nobody has thought of making the superstructure aerodynamic. Pushing something the size of a decent sized apartment building through the air at 20 mph has to take a lot of energy.
There are several points where ships already have places for tugboats to attach ... for retrofitting, using these is the cheapest way to go.
They will be tacking back and forth behind the parasail.
I think that the cruise ship market would be perfect for this invention. As is, there's always a huge going away party on a cruise ship, after leaving port..and watching the sails go up, would just add to the atmosphere of going away to sea (regardless of how effective the sail actually was)
------ Work is so much easier when you don't
You use engines to enter and leave port ... add the sails for a boost when you are at sea.
No need for dredging.
Actually, that's exactly what it's called -- a ground-effect airplane or a ground-effect aircraft. The advantages are there -- safer in the event of a catastrophic loss of power (due to only falling a few hundred feet at most), able to move huge masses with more conventionally-sized wings, and less detailed training for the crew. However, I recall that fuel efficiency and noise become a problem, as does dust kick-up on overland routes.
An amusing anecdote that I heard in ground school had to do with the maiden flight of what would become the U-2. The take-off and initial cruise tests worked out fine, but when it came in to land, the ground effect wouldn't let the plane low enough to land. Even sitting right at the stall line with the stall alarm buzzing at him, the pilot just couldn't get the thing down. Eventually, he brought it a little below stall speed and smacked it down rather hard, reportedly to the severe dismay and annoyance of the ground crew. Lockheed responded by doing some work on the wings to allow a more normal landing.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Everything will be "obvious" one day. And, who are you to say that the FAT filesystem wasn't as difficult to design as these parasails?
One man's mystery is another man's obvious, and one man's common sense is another man's impossible. Everything that has ever been patented would have been invented (or discovered) by someone else in due time. Where does that fit into the patent system?
The rudder is used to change direction.
The keel is used as resistance. Because it has a large surface area, it resists the ship being pushed off line by the force of the wind. It's like squeezing a seed between your fingers. Your fingers are pushing up and down, but the seed shoots out sideways. This happens because your fingers keep the seed from going up or down.
This is needed because the wind may be blowing north/south and you need to go east/west. Just turning the sail and the rudder will only change the direction the ship goes so much, you'll never end up going crosswind, let alone upwind.
If you just turn the rudder, it won't change the direction the ship goes, just the direction it points.
I would think a long, slab-sided, deep draft ship might be able to use its own sides as a keel for this purpose. I don't know how effectively though.
The reason for the deeper draft is because the keel can't be removed on large ships. It protrudes down (see below) a long way, even when you're on engines.
The other thing a keel does (and this is perhaps more important on regular sailing ships) is keep the boat from heeling or flipping over when the wind fills the sails. The wind force wants to push the top of the boat over, so the keel is very heavy and sticks far down so that the boat won't tip over from that force. On a ship with a kite sail like this one, the attachment of the string can be put low enough (near the CG) that the boat will not try to flip over when the wind blows.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The sail is filled with compressed air to give it the right shape. I imagine helium would be expensive for something so big that is inflated and deflated repeatedly.
A sailboat is limited in manuverability and it's easy for any boat with its own power to approach the ship from a direction which it cannot run away from. So they'd would be easy to capture.
It's unclear that war/privateers and piracy are much of a problem crossing the Pacific right now.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
"One of the things I was looking forward too as gas/oil prices skyrocketing was a decrease in offshore manufacturing. Economics and exploitation of slave labor may say that it's cheaper to manufacture something and then send it 2,000 miles over ship rather than manufacture locally, that entire equation depends on cheap oil."
The ultimate would be putting factories* onto ships, and sailing them were the resources were cheapest.
*Of course it doesn't just have to be factories. An entire coding company on the water. Medicine on boats.
Let me guess: the USPTO granted a patent on a "device used to capture energy from wind, thereby generating forward motion of the attached vehicle" despite thousands of years' worth of prior art concerning this thing called a "sail?"
Nope. Nobody made any such statement. I'm sure you're going to scream "omg it was just a joke" next.
Someone should patent unfunny, so that we can sue you off of SlashDot.
No I didn't RTFA
Obviously.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
I was trying to find a link.
The advantage is it could go various directions easily, and with no need for a huge keel. But apparently, yeah, it sucked.
Most interestingly, the ship moved on the same principles that make a curveball curve.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
My father's Chevy Suburban has a tank that holds about 40 gallons. I seriously doubt that would move a cruise ship. Does it take 40 gallons per amount of time at a certain speed? Does it take 40 gallons to actually get the thing into motion from a dead stop? Your statistic is very useless as presented, particularly when it's "from a friend" rather than "from a friend who fuels cruise ships" or "from a friend who is an accountant for a cruise ship company."
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
Bad weather don't you mean any weather. Just ask any one who has ever worked on a ship or barge tow how dangerous that is. When that line breaks and snaps back it can go through armour plate.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
There is a company (mostly one guy, actually) - http://www.kiteship.com/ - that has been experimenting, testing, and building kites for boats of various sizes - including maxi sailboats and AC Boats, and has been testing much larger kites designed for ships. They look a little different from the kites designed for kiteboarding. It is not just materials, either - the shapes and techniques for setting and dousing have been big parts of it, as far as I understand.
The sky sails people seem to be trying to get on the hype bandwagon without having really built any sails, as far as I can tell.
the other flametrolls
Impressive. I've never seen anyone so into generalizations as to actually contract them.
Maybe it is irony. The concept has taken on a series of overlapping meanings between eiron and Kierkegaard. The blog you cite is sophomoric. Here is not the place for a reiteration of my sophomore paper on "Irony" but you can call using windpower to haul fossil fuel situational (or cosmic) irony. Ironically the new Oxford English Dictionary defines this type of irony in a less accurate, though more concise, manner than in my sophomoric paper: "Irony is a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result."
In wartime... truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies. (Churchill)
The showstopper disadvantage to ground effect craft are that any practically-sized ground effect craft must operate at an altitude of less than half the wingspan of the plane, in other words, at an altitude where it may be struck by a freak wave or rogue wave. So, they can't safely be used on the open ocean. Russia did use Ekranoplans in the Caspian and Black seas - they were cheap to run and could haul incredible loads.
Safety is, of course, not a showstopper for military uses, and flying in ground effect avoids ground-based radar detection.
Page 4. To disassemble civilization, just follow the assembly instructions from page 2 in reverse order.
I believe that FAT was obvious because I helped create a number of disk systems in the 1970s at IBM and, later, DEC.
In my opinion, FAT revealed no technical innovation throughout it's lifetime. It may not be obvious to you, but it was obvious to us working in that arena at the time. That's why the only patents that MS has been granted on FAT is about its long filename extention. It's not an innovation that anyone wants to license for innovation's sake - it is only useful for MS-Windows compatibility. MS was not granted any patents on the file system structure itself.
"This is very inexpensive, but is very wasteful - there is no technical reason why a store could not have a sanitary 2-liter filling station where you just take the same bottle over and over to obtain your beverage of choice."
Our local grocery stores already do this with water. I don't think it would work with all beverages due to their nature.
My penthouse on a Norwegian cruise overlooked/cantilevered the port bridge wing. I hollered down at the cappy, asking him a slew of questions. According to the nice cappy, he mentioned that the steam-powered beast used heavy fuel oil (like tar) for the boilers, and used about a gallon of fuel for every few inches. The side-thrusters also used gallons/inches (these are deisel-powered monsters).
they are ordinary engined ships, with sails attached. You can still make the runs in the same amount of time, but use the sail when the winds are favorable, and power back the engines, thus saving fuel.
Fuel costs are enormous expenses in running a ship. 3 million dollars? The fuel savings would pay for it in little time on a large cargo or tanker ship.
The problem with adding traditional sails to powered ships is they reduce cargo capacity and ease of access to said cargo for load/unload. These sails are tethered and fold up easily, requiring minimal storage and don't change cargo access.
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"In order to gurarantee a steady supply of a commodity you had to have big wharehouses at each end."
Or you could have underseas pipelines. It's amazing what you can send through a pipe.
Mod up! Great grandparent IS ironic.
why cant we use some kind of modified regular sail,like the ones ships used before vapor and fuel, to me they seem whay more practical than using some weird parachute.
I'm going to buy a Prius and put a sail on it. That way I can be even more smug than every hybrid owner on the road.
"You call THAT a hybrid? Pfff."
Try multiplying that by about 100-1000. The largest freighters displace more than 100,000 tons, and supertankers can displace several times that.
The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank.
-- Scotty.
The Walker Wing Sail system was designed in the 70s when fuel was 'expensive' and the idea was to outfit freighters with the Wing Sails to help reduce fuel costs. Unfortunately, once the fuel 'shortages' of the 70's went away, Mr Walker found it very difficult to sell his systems. He started making his own Trimarans when no boat builders would license his design and build boats using it. But finacially solid orders were too few and only a handful of his boats were made utilizing the Wing Sail design. Some are still afloat today.
http://www.lusas.com/case/composite/wingsail.html
So I think the Walker Wing Sail makes more sense than this para-sail system.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Those of you who have never been out of littoral water (bays, rivers, harbors, canals, lakes, etc) please do a little research before deep-sixing an idea.
The largest sailing ships (of the Chinese Great Fleet) ever made approached size of WWII aircraft carriers (Enterprise/Lexington/Yorktown size) and measured their mainsails in fractional acreage.
I've been a professional blue-ocean sailor for several years. Calm seas and no wind are two things you rarely see unless you are in a brown-water (littoral waters) environment. One of the reasons the current shipping lanes are shaped the way they are is due to great-circle fuel efficiency. The older shipping routes followed the areas of regular wind "down where the trade winds blow" and were essentially 'free'. A tradeoff of a 5% longer route for a deduction of 5% in fuel costs is something that any shipping agency would be willing to consider. There is a print-out on our bridge that shows fuel consumption ($$ also) per hour per engine at the 'sweet spots' throttle settings. My captain much prefers to not burn more fuel than he needs to.
"To experience it the way we intended, you need Macromedia Flash Player 5, a plug-in for your Wed Browser that can play the content we've created."
This is terrible. Do these people not want to show actual content, but instead substitute it with flashy lights and whatever else you need flash 5 for?
eom
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
No, that's not until the semi-dupe.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
These kites are basically like spinnakers, moving the ship to leeward. This technology has been available since paleolithic times, when a dugout canoe could be outfitted with a rag on a couple of sticks. A major advance was made by the Arabs some 2000 years ago, with the invention of the Lateen rig, which is still just two sticks and a rag, but the rag forms a conic section, and pulls the boat towards the wind. Sailing on the prevailing winds certainly is useful, but these kites won't be anywhere near as energy-efficient as the large steel square-rigged freighters that were used to transport coal and other bulk goods around the beginning of the last century. They had a steam engine, but used it to power the winches to tack rig. That's the sort of thing we need; this kite retrofit is just a stopgap.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain.
Um....your stall speed is lower when you're in ground effect. (the ground interrupts the formation of downwash or wingtip vortices) That story makes no sense. You went to flight school? Yikes.
Ownyourphone.com. Custom ringtones, cheap and easy
This sort of thing seems like an excellent time to use carbon nanotubes. You need a long, very strong, flexible and light cable to hold the kite. In fact, I think the cable strength and weight might be the biggest limiting factor of the thrust potential of the kite. (other then the wind availability, of course) You might even use nanotubes in the rib structure of the kite itself to keep it strong. Here's hopeing they get the price of nanotubes down soon.
-Daniel
Ownyourphone.com. Custom ringtones, cheap and easy
The BBC ran a radio interview with the inventor last November. The following page gives a bit more detail than the MSNBC story, but most there is a lot more in the radio programme (RealAudio link on the page)....
t h_20051124.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/costingtheear
Fishing it out of the waves? That's a whole 'nother idea entirely. You can have a sail underwater to catch currents to pull you along as well.
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
Give me oars any day. You probably couldn't row a freighter to save your life.
Kids have it so easy...
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
The engines these ships use simply generate electricity, the actual drive is electric. So why not supplement the drive with electricity produced by onboard wind turbines?
Deleted
at night: I lost my car keys in the bushes, but i am looking at the sidewalk for it, thats where the light is..
lol, people look where the light is rather then where the object of search is all the time. Religion is an example, i have found the light!
Guess in some extent you are forced to do this, but thinking about things you cant see is called speculation, the effectiveness of this is less then moderate. Physics deals with what we can measure, mathematics only with what is doable with the theorems that we have.
Ofcourse if you are looking for a person hiding in the dark his trail my still be in the light, but the light is not the goal.
Obviously SOME asshole has no sense of humor. Hint: the post was funny, not a troll.
Vertical columnar wind turbines are independent of wind direction and can pipe rotational kinetic directly to a propellor. Wind powered, propellor driven, independence from wind direction, plenty of power to be had. Best of both worlds; if the drive train can be made efficient enough you get fuel-free shipping.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
The russian army has/had a "ground effect" plane, usable on open ocean on waves up to 2m high. Its speed was in the hundreds of miles per hour, and it could haul about 2000 men ready for battle. Anyway, at waves 2m tall, this is just for good weather on the ocean
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/whatsnew/bc0b041c051
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Yep, I intended it to be a jab at the USPTO taken as tongue-in-cheek. Apparantly some people here need it explained to them so that they do not throw mod points away.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
My friend has a stack in the bathroom and there are a lot of military articles, some quite disturbing e.g. cool new domestic surveillance technology with a rah-rah attitude.
Man, you really need that seminar!
I'm relaying the story as it was told to me a decade ago. Some of the details may be lost, but the fact that stall speed is lower doesn't negate the presence of a stall speed.
Incidentally, I passed the written test at the time with flying colors, but didn't have the money to undertake the practical side.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.