Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
...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.
Loading...
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
Then oil prices came back down, those batteries turned out to be harder to design than they thought, and Exxon discovered they weren't very good at managing high tech. Back to business as usual. And here we are again...
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.
Amusing, but in all seriousness, I'd love to see how well this stuff can plot courses through winds. This kind of thing could also be great for space travel - both for plotting through solar winds and gravitational assists (or both at once). If it's that much better at plotting through winds than whatever else we've had up until now, maybe it's also better than whatever orbital navigation plotting we have rigth now.
It's unclear that war/privateers and piracy are much of a problem crossing the Pacific right now.
Not in the Pacific, but there's issues in the caribbean, around Africa(Somolia), and certain sections of the middle east.
What protects the giant cargo ships is that they're so big it'd take a ship of equal size to steal the cargo, and even pirates could get ahold of a ship that size, it'd be rather trivial to track by satellite, and most of the navies of the world consider pirate suppression part of their core duties. If there's nothing else more important going on, even an American Aircraft carrier will divert to chase suspected pirates.
Most pirates today mostly steal the crew's effects, maybe part of a container, and sometimes take the crew hostage for ransoms.
You don't hear much about it, but cruise liners, which you'd think would be tempting targets, are also among the fastest, especially when they turn all the engines up. With the smaller boats pirates tend to use, they either lack the speed or the endurance to catch them. Even if they do, it has a huge crew that's also trained(and armed) to keep pirates from getting aboard. That and the moment they spot pirates they'll be calling for help, and remember how I mentioned most navies like catching pirates? Pirates chasing a cruise liner will have every naval asset that has a prayer of intercepting will be applying full power to the engines.
I don't read AC A human right
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.
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.
And only on Slashdot could someone make such a worthless comment.
Solar wind, gravitational plots, and air winds all represent very subtle and dynamic forces that can't be directly controlled (unlike aerodynamic forces and engine thrust, for instance). If these guys are able to accurately navigate through winds and do it all more efficiently (and faster, hopefully) than currently available, the navigational community could apply their methods to a lot of different methods of navigation. It's like finding a better turbine blade - jets, powerplants, and watercraft could all benefit.