From the web-page: "Much of the expanding long-distance goods traffic on our oceans as well as many leisure boats could be powered by ecological solar energy. Solar energy will be the future of navigation techniques. But it needs more publicity and more confidence."
It sounds nice, but the practical application for the actual transportation of goods is something else.
The great things about ships is that the volume increases as a cubic function (roughly) of the length, but the drag only increases as the square. The area available to solar energy is more like a direct linear relationship to length what with ships being kind of long and skinny. That means that you can eventually build a ship big enough to carry it's own fuel to cross an ocean, and if you go bigger it can carry cargo even. Bigger still means more cargo with less fuel per cargo needed (generally). This is why we now have 1000 foot long container ships and 300,000 DWT ULCCs (Ultra Large Crude Carriers). But these ships that require less energy per volume still require a *lot* of energy, and not just energy, put power too (they need that energy fast). For example, the ship I work on (600 feet long by 75 feet wide, about 20,000 GRT--small by today's standards) requires about 14,000 horsepower to travel at about 17 knots when fully loaded. Just using a crude area approximation for the ship's dimensions and, say, 33% efficiency for solar cells you would get about 1630 kW of power, or about 2180 horsepower. 2180 horsepower won't even move a ship that size fast enough to maintain steerage. This isn't even mentioning the other auxiliary electrical loads associated with a ship (pumps, motors, air conditioning, sewage processing, etc.). Factoring average load for my ship in to that, you get about 1000 kW (1350 HP) available for propulsion. This is like trying to row a canoe with a spoon. Of course, if you don't put anything in the ship power consumption goes way down and you eventually get to the point where you have a boat like what they're using. But what business that makes money by moving lots of goods from A to B on a schedule is going to build a fleet of boats that can't carry anything and go very slowly? Maybe recreational boaters, but I don't see it so much for the commercial shipping industry.
I do wish them fair winds and following seas for their crossing, and hope that they are indeed correct that "Solar energy will be the future of navigation techniques" if for no other reason than we need to, as a society, start reducing out carbon footprint. As an engineer (a marine engineer, at that), though, I see a very long a tortuous path ahead.
Assuming this your post wasn't completely tongue-in-cheek...
So, in order to "mine" the water vapor out of the atmosphere, you would need some way of condensing the vapor. Any sort of heat exchanger would work, but the laws of thermodynamics dictate that, in the end, you would just be heating the atmosphere up more than accomplishing anything else. This does assume that the control volume for the system is the earth itself, and you're not using space as your 'cold reservoir'--doing that gets into all sort of pesky heat transfer issues as space is rather non conductive. There is something to be said for radiation, but it would only really be effective if shielded from the sun. Anyway, since the most likely mediums for heat rejection would probably be either the atmosphere (you lose), the ocean (you lose again), or the terrestrial bits of the earth (you lose still), all you would be doing it heating the atmosphere up more and putting more water vapor into the atmosphere in the long run.
It's actually quite unfair to paint the patent as the evil you are. In my own personal experience, the patent is a very useful tool for small business and companies to gain an edge over larger competitors. I know this firsthand via my father, who owns a small engineering/manufacturing business and has taken several patents over the 20+ years he's been in business, and one of my former college professors, who worked for a small company that developed hyper sensitive piezo-electric vibration transducers. The patents my father has taken out have allowed his company to come out with good, unique products that fill a niche in his industry and not have to live in fear that a big company will just steal the product away, market it, and profit unfairly. This means that he is willing to spend time developing and engineering new products because the new products actually stand a chance of turning a profit for the company. Granted, this hasn't stopped some overseas companies from copying some of his products, but in the US at least he can profit from his risks.
When used properly, the patent system is quite effective at encouraging small businesses to develop and innovate because it means if they come out with something really good, they stand a chance of success against other well established businesses. The problem isn't the patent; it's the large companies that are trying to stifle all industrial innovation by patenting everything in sight so no one, except the patent holder, can innovate anything.
Yes, they put a man on the moon (several actually) in a decade, but they also had two major casualties in about three years (Apollo 1 and 13), and lost three Astronauts in a test. I guess that's the price they pay for "the ability to take risks"--loose three of your best men in a test.
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From the web-page: "Much of the expanding long-distance goods traffic on our oceans as well as many leisure boats could be powered by ecological solar energy. Solar energy will be the future of navigation techniques. But it needs more publicity and more confidence."
It sounds nice, but the practical application for the actual transportation of goods is something else.
The great things about ships is that the volume increases as a cubic function (roughly) of the length, but the drag only increases as the square. The area available to solar energy is more like a direct linear relationship to length what with ships being kind of long and skinny. That means that you can eventually build a ship big enough to carry it's own fuel to cross an ocean, and if you go bigger it can carry cargo even. Bigger still means more cargo with less fuel per cargo needed (generally). This is why we now have 1000 foot long container ships and 300,000 DWT ULCCs (Ultra Large Crude Carriers). But these ships that require less energy per volume still require a *lot* of energy, and not just energy, put power too (they need that energy fast). For example, the ship I work on (600 feet long by 75 feet wide, about 20,000 GRT--small by today's standards) requires about 14,000 horsepower to travel at about 17 knots when fully loaded. Just using a crude area approximation for the ship's dimensions and, say, 33% efficiency for solar cells you would get about 1630 kW of power, or about 2180 horsepower. 2180 horsepower won't even move a ship that size fast enough to maintain steerage. This isn't even mentioning the other auxiliary electrical loads associated with a ship (pumps, motors, air conditioning, sewage processing, etc.). Factoring average load for my ship in to that, you get about 1000 kW (1350 HP) available for propulsion. This is like trying to row a canoe with a spoon. Of course, if you don't put anything in the ship power consumption goes way down and you eventually get to the point where you have a boat like what they're using. But what business that makes money by moving lots of goods from A to B on a schedule is going to build a fleet of boats that can't carry anything and go very slowly? Maybe recreational boaters, but I don't see it so much for the commercial shipping industry.
I do wish them fair winds and following seas for their crossing, and hope that they are indeed correct that "Solar energy will be the future of navigation techniques" if for no other reason than we need to, as a society, start reducing out carbon footprint. As an engineer (a marine engineer, at that), though, I see a very long a tortuous path ahead.
Assuming this your post wasn't completely tongue-in-cheek...
So, in order to "mine" the water vapor out of the atmosphere, you would need some way of condensing the vapor. Any sort of heat exchanger would work, but the laws of thermodynamics dictate that, in the end, you would just be heating the atmosphere up more than accomplishing anything else. This does assume that the control volume for the system is the earth itself, and you're not using space as your 'cold reservoir'--doing that gets into all sort of pesky heat transfer issues as space is rather non conductive. There is something to be said for radiation, but it would only really be effective if shielded from the sun. Anyway, since the most likely mediums for heat rejection would probably be either the atmosphere (you lose), the ocean (you lose again), or the terrestrial bits of the earth (you lose still), all you would be doing it heating the atmosphere up more and putting more water vapor into the atmosphere in the long run.
It's actually quite unfair to paint the patent as the evil you are. In my own personal experience, the patent is a very useful tool for small business and companies to gain an edge over larger competitors. I know this firsthand via my father, who owns a small engineering/manufacturing business and has taken several patents over the 20+ years he's been in business, and one of my former college professors, who worked for a small company that developed hyper sensitive piezo-electric vibration transducers. The patents my father has taken out have allowed his company to come out with good, unique products that fill a niche in his industry and not have to live in fear that a big company will just steal the product away, market it, and profit unfairly. This means that he is willing to spend time developing and engineering new products because the new products actually stand a chance of turning a profit for the company. Granted, this hasn't stopped some overseas companies from copying some of his products, but in the US at least he can profit from his risks.
When used properly, the patent system is quite effective at encouraging small businesses to develop and innovate because it means if they come out with something really good, they stand a chance of success against other well established businesses. The problem isn't the patent; it's the large companies that are trying to stifle all industrial innovation by patenting everything in sight so no one, except the patent holder, can innovate anything.
Yes, they put a man on the moon (several actually) in a decade, but they also had two major casualties in about three years (Apollo 1 and 13), and lost three Astronauts in a test. I guess that's the price they pay for "the ability to take risks"--loose three of your best men in a test.
That's not toilet paper, it's tissue-on-a-role.
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