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Ask Slashdot: Can FOSS Help In the Fight Against Climate Change?
dryriver writes: Before I ask my question, there already is free and open-source software (FOSS) for wind turbine design and simulation called QBlade. It lets you calculate turbine blade performance using nothing more than a computer and appears compatible with Xfoil as well. But consider this: the ultimate, most efficient and most real-world usable and widely deployable wind turbine rotor may not have traditional "blades" or "foils" at all, but may be a non-propeller-like, complex and possibly rather strange looking three-dimensional rotor of the sort that only a 3D printer could prototype easily. It may be on a vertical or horizontal axis. It may have air flowing through canals in its non-traditional structure, rather than just around it. Nobody really knows what this "ultimate wind turbine rotor" may look like.
The easiest way to find such a rotor might be through machine-learning. You get an algorithm to create complex non-traditional 3D rotor shapes, simulate their behavior in wind, and then mutate the design, simulate again, and get a machine learning algorithm to learn what sort of mutations lead to a better performing 3D rotor. In theory, enough iterations -- perhaps millions or more -- should eventually lead to the "ultimate rotor" or something closer to it than what is used in wind turbines today. Is this something FOSS developers could tackle, or is this task too complex for non-commercial software? The real world impact of such a FOSS project could be that far better wind turbines can be designed, manufactured and deployed than currently exist, and the fight against climate change becomes more effective; the better your wind turbines perform, and the more usable they are, the more of a fighting chance humanity has to do something against climate change. Could FOSS achieve this?
The easiest way to find such a rotor might be through machine-learning. You get an algorithm to create complex non-traditional 3D rotor shapes, simulate their behavior in wind, and then mutate the design, simulate again, and get a machine learning algorithm to learn what sort of mutations lead to a better performing 3D rotor. In theory, enough iterations -- perhaps millions or more -- should eventually lead to the "ultimate rotor" or something closer to it than what is used in wind turbines today. Is this something FOSS developers could tackle, or is this task too complex for non-commercial software? The real world impact of such a FOSS project could be that far better wind turbines can be designed, manufactured and deployed than currently exist, and the fight against climate change becomes more effective; the better your wind turbines perform, and the more usable they are, the more of a fighting chance humanity has to do something against climate change. Could FOSS achieve this?
The best way to fight climate change with it is to turn it off.
This is a job for evolutionary software. Definitely.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
FOSS can solve the hunger crisis, cure all disease, and anything else your imagination wants to believe.
Reality may be different however.
You get an algorithm to create complex non-traditional 3D rotor shapes, simulate their behavior in wind, and then mutate the design, simulate again, and get a machine learning algorithm to learn what sort of mutations lead to a better performing 3D rotor. In theory, enough iterations -- perhaps millions or more -- should eventually lead to the "ultimate rotor"
You're describing Genetic Algorithms. It's a fairly old technique. It shouldn't be too hard to implement it. The problem here is not FOSS, it's computational power. You need quite a lot of CPU time to run all the simulations and evolve the solution.
Some sort of distributed computing framework like INSERT_PROJECT_NAME@home would work. But then you'd have to convince everyone to use it....
... unless it's GPL3.
no
...Such that they slice the birds into easy-to-swallow bite-sized pieces instead of mostly just pulverizing them?
Summer BBQ season is nearly upon us, after all.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
And they’re wasting tons of energy for funbux.
A massive carbon tax would do a much more effective job at accelerating our transition off fossil fuels and slowing global warming.
A massive carbon tax so that, to start with, Americans pay the same for gas as Europeans, who do just fine with that, and then keep increasing it.
That's the best thing that would work, because except for tilting the playing field the way we have to move, it lets the free market take care of how to achieve the change.
But unfortunately, an effectively large carbon tax would take politicians with brains, a conscience, and guts. So I'm not that optimistic given the garbage we currently have.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
"Traditional" turbine designs are already up to 80% theoretical maximum efficiency. Trying to eke that last 20% is not really going to save the planet since we're nowhere near using that much wind in the first place.
That is - if you want to get FOSS to improve tech adoption, direct it to making things more affordable or accessible, not toward having more expensive higher-efficiency, higher-complexity devices.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
"In theory, enough iterations -- perhaps millions or more -- should eventually lead to the "ultimate rotor" or something closer to it than what is used in wind turbines today."
That pretty much sums up machine learning/AI today. A million monkeys on a million typewriters will eventually write Shakespeare. Except it won't happen.
Slashdot was once a tech site for CS and EE news, operating systems, Linux, BSD, etc. It veered of course a couple times with the Jon Katz episodes, but was able to quickly restabilze.
These "glboal warming" stories have pretty much hijacked the content on Slashdot. It is political and completely off topic for tech news. It reeks of George Soros and other globalist one-worlders and fellow traverllers.
Please boycott the advertisers until Slashdot rights itself, if that is even possible. Slashdot is only a name, just another entry in some godless corporate log book of an anonymous holding company.
The real core who originally made Slashdot what it is have been gone for ages. Now we have pretenders using the name but the the spirit of what had made Slashdot popular and famous.
True or False?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
#DeleteFacebook
Fluid flow simulation is what one might call a military grade problem - efficient and accurate ways of doing it are either protected by commercial secretcy (because CAD software to design multimillion dollar yachts and aircraft is expensive) or actual military secrecy - because the problem you're solving is the same sort of problem that's being solved (for example) when designing SSBN propellers and hulls to minimize cavitation and make the ships run silent.
The whole point of a carbon tax is:
Energy != Fossil Fuels
There are other ways we can harness solar energy, and geothermal energy. Our addiction to the drug of cheap fossil fuels is preventing us from getting to those other ways fast enough.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I have to disagree. The fact that Linux (and much other FOSS) exists is evidence to support my claim.
Back in the 1990s, there was no "market model" for FOSS. That came later than the products themselves.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2...
https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/se...
https://nikolamotor.com/one
https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/mo...
https://www.arcimoto.com/vehic...
http://www.zeromotorcycles.com...
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Or mining Bitcoin.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
A free software package, Tux Racer, could help in the fight against Climate Change. No, I'm not talking about the Tux Racer game as we all, ahem, normally play it. This would be a version where the player moves a cardboard cutout 'tux' down the 'screen' (a big sheet of cardboard.)
The energy savings would be immense, though Steam would lose a lot of revenue.
If you want to save the world through free and open source software, there's an easy way to do this: stop building systems that waste resources.
Don't use programming languages that spend 10 CPU cycles to do 1 cycle of work. Don't arrange things so a program is recompiled every time it is run. Write software that uses less RAM. Write replacements for spyware-laden crap. Do not support battery-burning DRM and tell them why. Encourage wired rather than wireless connections.
Stop thinking like a coder and start thinking like an engineer.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
eg https://eawephdseminar.science... p33
in which he compares cfd results from the free software OpenFoam for a wind turbine in cfd and in reality. Military grade my arse.
I just do not believe that we humans will be able to do anything about it in the next 50 years.
;)
Just my 2 cents
In this case, the design of the blade for wind turbines is only a part of the answer and good vertical axis wind turbine, needs a far more complex design to achieve really good outcomes and the blade itself, whilst important does not the whole design create. A really tricky problem to resolve but human imagination always delivers in one way or another. I find it a interesting subject and have whiled away many an hour coming up with and investigating various designs. Always puttering around with one in the back of my mind, it's an interesting subject.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
It's relatively easy to make pancakes from scratch. Look up a recipe and be daring: make some and be proud!
Nah, for OP the best way to fight climate change is for him to /wrists.
Yes take a look at: http://www.solarnetwork.net/v4...
an Archimedes screw approaches theoretical maximum efficiency
Go well
There is no point in hunting for a more efficient rotor design for two reasons:
1) The current designs are so near perfect efficiency that there's little to be gained for a lot of effort.
2) Efficiency of the rotor, once it's "good enough" is not a big deal. When your "fuel is free" except for the cost of the equipment to collect it, the significant measures of efficiency become "power per dollar spent on equipment" and "energy per dollar spent on maintenance and site and equipment amortization".
As with the carnot limit on how much of the energy in heat can be extracted by a heat engine, there is a theoretical limit to how much of the kinetic energy you can extract from the air (or other compressible fluid) passing through a given swept area. It is called the "Betz limit". It is16/27ths, about 59.3%. It occurs because extracting energy from the wind slows it down, reducing the amount of air passing through the mill. It works like the laffer curve in tax rates: If you take no energy as the wind passes by, you get no energy. If you take all the energy you stop the wind, so you get no energy. Somewhere between there's a percentage of extraction that gets you the maximum. For wind, that's 16/27ths.
As you approach the Betz limit you reach a point of diminisihing returns. You can throw progressively larger amounts of money into the design of your mill to get progressively smaller amounts of additional energy. Or you can spend a little extra money to just make your mill a little bigger, which lets it sweep a lot more area and collect a lot more energy.
Modern 3-bladed horizontal-axis wind turbines (HAWTs), running at a tip speed ratio in the 6 to 7 range, get within a few percent of Betz perfection. (Higher TSR would get you a little more, but above 6 you're starting to get to where a storm could make the airflow near the tips go supersonic, which is a problem structurally.) Scaling them up gives you more power per unit cost, so the utility mills converged to giant 3-blade HAWTs.
Horizontal axis because vertical axis designs tend to be either FAR less efficient or have terrible issues with vibration (though the helical darrius seems practical for small mills). The main advantage of a VAWT over a HAWT for small (i.e. off-grid residential/farm/small business) mills is that HAWTs need to be made to track the wind but "furled" in a high wind to avoid damage, which makes them more complex and failure prone. (HAWTs may need furling, too, but they don't need tracking and they're easier to overbuild to reduce the need for furling).
Three blade because one blade (like a maple leaf) and two-blade have vibration problems when yawing to face a changing wind. Three or more do not. More blades don't buy you any extra efficIency so three is the least expensive to build.
If you want to improve wind turbines you'd do well to concentrate on less expensive construction methods, rather than trying to chase the tiny amount of efficiency that's left.
If you want to improve other aspects of renewable energy, there's more room for improvement in control, storage, photovoltaic designs, direct collection of heat, and cooling (including radiative coupling to the four-degree kelvin cosmic background temperature through the "infrared window").
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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This thing is as far as I know neither commercially nor open source available. Maybe you can find some simulations programming languages but I would assume you will be writing the software.
Given you're most likely looking at writing a paper rather than developing a company, your software will have to be open source so it can be properly peer reviewed.
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https://github.com/bitcoin/bit...
As the fight is a social one, I doubt that this is the exception where a technical solution would work.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Improved alternators(they are not generators!) and reducing bearing friction will will bring a bigger gain.
As far as that goes better bearings would improve energy use in many areas!
So what did he say about telling the truth enough times?
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
There's plenty of renewable energy out there and our technology to extract it is for the most part is pretty good as it is. The biggest problem is a way to store this energy efficiently and cheaply. We have no solution for this at the moment. Power grids for example need to match usage exactly with generation at every instant. Don't do that and you start seeing brownouts (causing problems with consumer devices) or worse the generator blows up. Fossil Fuels are used for the reason that they're highly compact and huge sources of energy available on Demand. It's why they've been so difficult to get away from.
is this task too complex for non-commercial software?
or is it too complex for commercial software?
In any case, commercial and FOSS are not mutually exclusive.
with some assembly required
Nice links, but I don't see any real answers to the questions AC above asked....?
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Already blew the 1.5 degree carbon budget. On track to blow thru the 2.0 degree carbon budget very soon (2024? 2027?)
Wind power (and other alternative energy) is still good as are batteries that would allow coal plants to run at more efficient levels as are electric cars as are LED lighting solutions to reduce consumption.
If you want to address climate change you need to either find a safe (switchable) way to block incoming energy in huge quantities or you need to find a safe way (i.e. again- you can turn it off) to rapidly extract carbon.
For example, something that extracts carbon to make to rapidly make carbon fibers solid graphene would be useful.
But you are talking about needing to sequester 17 gigatons of carbon annually starting in about 10 years from now just to avoid blowing the 2.0 degree carbon budget.
Think larger.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.