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Football Field-Sized Kite Powers Latest Freighter
coondoggie writes to tell us that a new freighter set to launch in December will be receiving a hefty dose of power from a kite the size of a football field. The 460-foot ship, owned by the Beluga shipping company, hopes to see as much as a 50% drop in fuel consumption during optimal conditions. "The SkySails system consists of a towing kite with rope, a launch and recovery system and a control system for the whole operation. The control system acts like the autopitot systems on an aircraft, the company says. Autopilot software sends and receives data about the sail etc to make sure the sail is set at its optimal position. The company also says it provides an optional weather routing system so that ships can sail into optimal wind conditions.The kites typically fly at about 1,000 feet above sea level, thereby tapping winds that can be almost 50% stronger than at the surface. "
I feel sorry for all those wayward seagulls.
art is science made clear. -cocteau
to mention "Peanuts" is going to get a knock on the door in the middle of the night
????B.C. - Random Dude "You know this wind would be pretty cool if it were used to run a ship"
*Investors throw money at random dude*
1769 - James Watt "You know this steam engine thing would be pretty cool if it were used to run a ship"
*Investors throw money at Watt*
1896 - Karl Benz "You know this gas powered combustion engine thing would be pretty cool if it were used to run a ship"
*Investors throw monoey at Benz*
2007 - SkySails "You know this wind thing would be pretty cool if it were used to run a ship"
*Beluga corp. throws money at SkySails*
Seems to me that SkySails is a few millenia back on their innovation.
Enough said.
Trackball users will be first against the wall.
...I think Benjamin Franklin just crapped himself.
Still, good to see that people are trying different ideas.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
So a kite that provides most of the ship's power can only afford a 50% reduction in fuel consumption? Hmmm...
...but in the end I don't think it'll fly. Too bad, as the failure of such an interesting idea will really knock the wind out of their sails. I hope they don't blow it.
If that freighter is ever named Charlie Brown, run like heck.
This strikes me as a good example of the reusing old tech.
I think some of the article misses the point:
'What if fuel prices go down?' What if they don't? Prices will not go down in the long term and the companies using these will benefit the most.
'These can't be used in a head wind.' Well no sh*t Sherlock, thanks for that. It's to cut fuel use, not eliminate it. Any cut will be good for the company and the environment.
Certainly some bird is going to get hit by that kite! It will look ugly flying offshore hundreds of miles from where we can see it! The kite is made from polymers derived from fossil fuels! It somehow violates the second law of thermodynamics! It will sap energy from global winds leading to something bad! Won't somebody please think of the children [ of oil company executives]!
Seriously though... I can't think of any alternatives to fossil fuels that haven't run into enormous amount of flack.
For that matter, what is a pitot and how do you automate it?
Once the pirates learn that there's a tasty morsel attached to that giant kite on the horizon...
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
All they need is to have a moderately strong, steady wind that is abaft the beam. Plus good enough weather that they don't risk the kite and its hardware. If you sail the traditional sail-era trade routes the wind is abaft the beam quite a bit more than 50% of the time, the wind is steady at 1000' in the open ocean pretty much always as long as the weather is good, and you can supply your own finagle factor for how often the weather is good.
Frankly, I think the major limitation on any kind of sail power has been crew cost. Big freighters run with tiny crews these days, and often not very well trained and not especially reliable, except for the top few officers. Getting a crew that can handle a big sail competently, without endangering the cost of the apparatus, sounds expensive. But maybe they've got a robotic, computerized control system that can eliminate that problem.
Why not add lightweight solar cells to the top of the kite? A collection area the size of a football field is pretty significant, and there's no reason copper wires can't be integrated into the tow rope. The electricity generated could be used for, well, anything.
Powering boats with sunlight is nothing short of miraculous. I hope that some day we are able to propel ships with other elements, such as the wind, as well. What an incredible world our children shall surely inherit!
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
What's a football field?
The original article is here:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/08/1735227
The original article claimed a 33% savings in fuel costs. This new article claims a 50% savings under optimal conditions. Interestingly, the greenhouse gas savings are only 10-20%. Where is the logic in that?
If you've ever seen how those things can indescriminately restripe a parking lot with their crap, perhaps you'd feel differently.
How do you let the kite take to the sky? Some strong sailor boys running to stern with the rope in their hands? Helicopter? Ship running backwards? Hmmm.
Why put them on the sail. What are the odds that the sail will be pointing at the sun... Why put them on the sail/kite at all instead of the ship? Why risk them getting lost if the sail goes into the water or the cable fails? Why try to make the as flexable as the sail so it is easy to store in case of storm or headwinds? The electrical load of a freighter is actually pretty small compaired to the propulsion load. So are you going to carry a big honking electric motor to use make in to an hybrid? If so why care the extra weight and drag on the screw shaft for something you could only use for a few hours each day?
Why not? Because it wouldn't really help in any way and would cost a lot of money.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
There was an endless thread once in Make magazine's forums arguing the pros and cons of putting solar powered fans on a sail-powered car to make it go faster! Sheesh.
And obviously, as recent events prove (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/09/BAD8T8PLU.DTL ) , you need a non-dumbass boat driver who knows where the bridges are.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Otherwise, sooner or later, some unlucky pilot is going to suddenly find his left wing clipped off while flying at 900ft. (possibly damaging the kite control lines, in the process).
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
20% reduction in fuel used + 20% of fuel costs sold as carbon offsets = 40% reduction in fuel costs.
"That will do Austin."
It's approximately the length of 20 trucks by the width of 10 normal sized cars.
I read about this a while back.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Bah, all these industrial sized sails and windmills are sure to lead to a depletion of the planetary wind system. All we need is the media to hype it up and people will be observing how it used to be windier years ago.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I read an article about different versions of kite/sail technology for bulk cargo ships in Popular Science a long time ago. This was one of the companies mentioned.
I'm glad to see it wasn't just vaporware. If the the energy is there, might as well use it!
Why, yes I have been touched by His noodly appendage. And I plan to sue.
So ... it's a really big spinnaker?
Cool. I like it.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
What happens when the kite falls into water and the wind is not enough to lift it up wet? Or worse, what if it falls on top of the ship and hurts sailors, breaks things or rips? It seems we are too hasty to discard centuries of experience in designing sails, masts and lines. Even a spinnaker is at least tied to the top of the mast to keep it from falling and main sails are still useful in head and side winds.
I don't think it's so important how long it takes for a cargo to get somewhere so much as it's important that it get there when it's scheduled to do so, not earlier and not later. Modern manufacturing, to say nothing of port operations, rail schedules, et cetera, are pretty reliant on things being delivered at a certain hour on a certain day. If a boat happens to come in a day late or something, everything is flung out of synchrony -- you have to pay workers who are doing nothing, because the boat isn't there yet, and you have to hire other guys at overtime rates when the boat does come in, and meanwhile you've missed your rail connection and your factory has run out of raw materials or your showroom has run out of the popular new model of widget...
I really hope that this got modded "troll" by someone who doesn't speak English as a first language, because otherwise that's just retarded.
Give me a frickin break! This is purely an investor ripoff scheme. Sails? I mean kites? 50% energy savings? Did they fail to mention that the voyage will take 5 times longer to accomplish this savings and that if they throttled the regular engines back from 20+ knots to a point where the trip time was the same, the "savings" would evaporate?
Why do you suppose we shifted from sails to steam and then to internal combustion engines and then back to steam/nuclear in various Navies? It's because they are more efficient, reliable, controllable than wind powered propulsion. That's why even the most technologically advanced sailboats of today still have internal combustion engines for those countless times when sail just won't cut it.
All you utopians can flame me all you like. A dose of reality and old fashion time will show you that I am right. This is an investor scam doomed for failure.
The test sail, if you drill down, is 160 sq. m.
Hardly the size of a football field.
Squirrel!
A promising idea if they've done their deep engineering homework. The biggest problems I forsee are the possibility of large gradients across the kite, slack and tortion from monster waves, lightning and how to dump excess power.
But how many bowling balls does it weigh?
Really, we're all geeky adults here. Can't we use real units? And moreover, we're not all in the U.S. (I happen to be, but still).
When it docks in the U.S., it's 100 yards long by 160 feet wide. Apparently when the ship docks in a Canadian port the sail will expand to 100 meters long and 59.4 meters wide. When it docks anywhere in the rest of the world, it will expand to anywhere from 100 to 110 meters wide to 64 to 75 meters wide. I guess it'll fold out or something.
And when it docks in Australia, it will run about 165 meters long by 135 meters wide (and while it will be hard to figure out how it works or what it's doing, it will be brutally violent).
Can we find anything more ambiguous to compare it to? How many loaves of bread long is it?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
If you look at the pictures on the site it sure does not look like a football field sized parasail. And the recovery system is proportionally small too.
I don't know how atmospheric winds work but I assume they mostly blow in one direction. How high against downwind can a kite be made to fly. I assume these wing kites can sail a bit off directly down wind but unless they can fly more than 90 degrees off downwind like a sailboat then it's hard to see how this helps for the return journey.
Thus this 50% efficiency figure seems to me to only apply to one direction of travel. Overall, if one uses the same amount of energy in both direction then that's only a 25% savings. Not bad perhaps. But then do these winds exist at all lattitudes (e.g. through the newly opening northwest passage)?
Perhaps this may encourage deadheading ships empty on the return journey to keep down fuel costs on the unassisted leg. It would be an unanticpated consequence if this increased imbalance of trade between upwind and downwind countries.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Or better yet, what kind of football field?
Soccer (aka Football everywhere but the US)
American Football
Canadian Football
Australian Rules Football
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
But which football code are we talking about? The different games have different sized pitches you know... ;-)
A kite is about the last thing you want to run into an enormous amount of flak...
though i suppose it could flutter on, provided the flak doesn't hit the line...
I first heard about this when I was an undergrad studying naval architecture. Because of the poorly trained, tiny crews, many of whom don't even speak all the same language, my classmates and I never thought it would happen on a commercial ship. Clearly it has. Maybe it will even become common someday. Then again, it could be as unwieldy and difficult to manage as nuclear powered freigthers and oil tankers- examples of which you can pretty much count on one hand.
The main problem I see is the additional burden of a sail in an emergency. It almost surely has an emergency release (I would bet money on this), but dumping the sail to save the ship would probably be viewed by many captains as a career-ending move. Because of this some captains might be reluctant to dump the sail and an accident might result that otherwise may not have.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
It's approximately 0.0000017 times the size of Rhode Island.
The winds DO have prevelant directions, but those vary depending on where you are in the world. Some of the winds will go from east to west and others will go from west to east. As to how close you can get to the wind depends on a number of factors. Our c-scow could go about 5 degrees off the wind without a luft but only with 1 of our sails, the 2 other sails would allow about 10 degrees.But trying to make it go INTO the wind? No. The important thing was to have a DEEP center/side board, so that beats and reaches were forward motion.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
TCO is often overlooked.
Take a look at private boats -- sail VS diesel. Sure, sail power is free, right? No. The cost of the sail which wears out, the cost of the lines & riggings. Add it all up and get TCO. Depending on what you are doing, diesel may be cheaper. Especially in commercial applications.
The cost savings in fuel is offset by the cost in the kite, riggings, and management of the kite. The TCO will be interesting to see. I would be surprised if it was any better than a wash in savings.
Could you mount this system on any ship and expect it to work? Or do you (e.g.) need a purpose-designed hull (e.g. yacht-like keel) to resist sideways forces from the kite?
Also, I think you can tack into the wind with one of these. The kite is steerable, so it doesn't have to be directly downwind of the ship. It is just a scaled-up version of kite-surfing. (Tacking travels extra distance, of course, so it might not always be economic to use the kite.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Though I don't think it was the size of a football field, I remember this concept from Waterworld. As I recall, the kite gave the Mariner's boat quite a boost.
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tortion from monster waves
What to do with your kite is the least of Mr. Sailor's worries when monster wave comes along.
I would expect a big red quick-release button on the bridge would cut the thing free in a crisis. Preferably by means of explosive charges. Explosions during a crisis are always just the thing to get the crew extra motivated.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Makani power are planning to generate electricity using high altitude kites - at a cost competitive with coal power.
There's very little information about them for now but they did get a $10M investment from Google. Here is what Cringely dug up about them from old Usenet posts of one of the team members.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
You don't need solar cells at all. Just make both kite and cable conductive. There's an electric potential gradient of about 200 Volts/meter in the atmosphere. A kite flying at 300 meters height has a voltage difference of 60 kV with relation to the ship. Of course, the current will be small, but with a surface as big as a football field substantial power could be used.
Obviously, conditions aren't always optimal.
How many cubits is that? And how many libraries of congress can it hold?
Don't forget "number of nautical miles traveled" somewhere in your calcs.
It makes a substantial difference where the inflection point is.
It doesn't make sense to power a reefer container. I mean, yeah, if you've got an entire shipping container full of reefer, it'll take a few men with pretty strong lungs to smoke it all... and sure, it'll take away most of whatever drive they had to work... but it won't consume much in the way of fuel. Well, until the munchies hit. Lotsa calories in good munchies.
Thought this might interest those who didn't RTFA (or didn't have time to trawl through the website looking for it):
http://www.skysails.info/index.php?id=71&L=1
Also reported a year before that in The Economist.
http://economist.com/search/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_QPGRTPD&CFID=27211624&CFTOKEN=19337193
I wonder how fast this thing can be retracted in the event of a storm. Dropping sails is relatively fast but winding in thousands of feet of cable is going to take some time (length of cables would be the diagonal hypotenuse of an imaginary right triangle with a height of 1000ft and an unknown length possibly longer than 1000ft).
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
Something about athletic references and slashdot just doesn't mix.
Help Me! I'm trapped in the tubes! Oh noes! Here comes a internet!
I do kite sailing in the winter here in Norway, and the kite shown in the article is almost identical, except for size of course, with the kite I use. (I have also windsurfed since around 1990.)
My kite is a Peter Lynn Venom II http://www.peterlynnkiteboarding.com/, this is a twinskin kite which keeps its airfoil shape due to internal air pressure: A set of small mesh openings in the leading edge allows air into the opening between the front and back side.
This form of kite is an airfoil, not a spinnaker, the difference is huge:
A spinnaker is effectively a large bag to catch the wind, while a kite works best by having air moving faster on one side than the other. Among other things, this means that a kite allows you to sail much faster at an angle to the wind instead of straight downwind.
Another nice trick you can do with a kite, unlike a windsurfing rig, it to let the kite loop around in little figure-of-eights: This makes the airfoil move even faster through the air, increasing the lift particularly during a lull in the wind.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
Even without tacking it's a good thing. If there's a wind you've got a 50% chance of it being useful. Ships can do back to the old trade routes and get greater than 50% chance of favorable wind.
I'm more worried about things like rain. A sudden rain storm could bring the kite down and that'd be an awful lot of trailing cables and soggy kite in the water.
I guess if the the recovery mechanism has a fast winch it'll be Ok.
No sig today...
Excess power? The kite is "steerable" in the wind - so you could get almost zero power if you align it right.
The current kites are too small to have large wind gradients - especially when they are at their working height. The initial phase of launch and recovery (especially recovery) could be interesting, but the ship might maneuver to the best position to retrieve the kite
Almost zero power isn't zero power. I've seen traditional sailboats exceed their predicted hull speed under bare poles (just mast, no sails) on Lake Michigan. Scale that up to the north Atlantic or southern ocean and you'd better be concerned about the wind cross section the kite cable presents. Kites have another significant advantage over traditional sailboats when it comes to reducing power, you could always cut it loose and configure the kite and rigging to either be recoverable or sink to the bottom so whales don't try to eat it.
Optimal vs average?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
In my own very limited experience, the Fyrdraca and Gyrfalcon are extremely flexible, being clinker-built viking ships. The Surprise and Serenity are completely rigid for all practical purposes and can be lifted entirely into the air from their tow points without any damage. Doug Humphrey's Badtz Maru is a steel-hulled ex-NATO warship, and has limited flexibility as well as tremendous weight. I do not believe the Badtz will flex significantly if subjected to any reasonable propulsive impetus regardless of direction of force. I doubt it could be damaged by being dragged upwards from its tow point by any force a propulsive kite could possibly generate without snapping the kite's line. Remember the strength of the line will inevitably be severely limited by the weight restrictions on that line (unless you've invented sinclair monofilament).
I'm not involved with naval work but I think I can still conceptually explain it. You design an engine to operate at a design point - generally your predominant operating point. Aircraft engine manufacturers generally use a multi-point design and I imagine naval engines might too - other critical conditions are integrated into the design process.
Points that fall outside of these points are off-design. You might use less fuel but for some reason, the cycle is less efficient than before and more emissions are produced per pound thrust. So you could reduce your fuel consumption by a third but only reduce output emissions by 10-20% because the inefficiencies produce more emissions.
Gas savings increased when they realized they need a smaller engine to keep kite in the sky due to weight restrictions. Since its a dual cycle and burns oil instead of gasoline the greenhouse gas savings are a bit low even though gas savings have increased.
While upward force won't contribute to propulsion much, it may reduce drag. The more upward force you have, the less wallowing the ship does. I suspect this won't make much difference to a million ton vessel, but it seems plausible it would be significant.
But IANA nautical engineer, so I may be wrong.
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