Agreed. Wow. This "neo" forced format seems very strange. 

Flat. Difficult to sense the group activity. 

As yet, I cannot find one of the former most useful-to-me tools of searching our messages. 

As yet, I cannot find our Photos and Files and Links, if they exist yet or not. We had depth going on those folders. 

As yet, it seems the format is nearly saying, "No one is home here."  

Maybe I just have not yet discovered something that you help. Not sure. 

After some posts and debate DougS/JoeF, one sees two different ways are proposed:JoeF for exhaustiveness, and DougS for heuristics towards a system.

Exhaustiveness: advantages as encyclopedia,disadvantages as tool of development.

Heuristics:the inverse.

An example:a company like Makani,Ampyx or Selsam, after a short period of exhaustiveness,limits the choice and develops (heuristics) the tools for R&D about only one system.

To DougS,

I agree to your observations towards an elimination of what is not needed for R&D of AWE and for the most part of technical observations, above all after some years when some AWE schemes show limits, but with some critics:

• Making propositions
• Avoiding laughing about some countries,like for example Hungary, the country of great musicians like Bartok,or Liszt (I will play Liszt' sonata at piano recital *at AWEC2013 Berlin on September 10th)
• Understanding that among Pr.Crackpot (= Diafoirus from Molière;= Croche from Debussy...) some real professors can exist.
• Understanding that the reader of your posts will take you as a possible Pr.Crackpot

Your observations will be useful when you will put off some drivel.

PierreB

*I will present also a poster "Land and space used" and a prototype of FlygenKite 

Yeah Joe, for instance my screen indicated that I was the author of your message that YOU wrote, that I am replying to now. 

It seems difficult to understand who wrote what at a glance.

So confusing it kind of makes me want to just throw up my hands and close the window..

or just throw up!

:)

Hey Pierre

Listen, in a forum that covers a topic that most people would consider insane, we have to be able to loosen up and have a little fun.

I'm happy for someone to call me a crackpot once in a while - do you think it's never happened? 

On real wind energy groups we have real discussions about real issues in turbine design etc. and people still have various opinions - not everyone agrees on all the finer points, even people who actually KNOW what they're talking about.  Then you come here and people are still trying to ger DaVinci's non-flying "flying" machine to work sideways in reverse, as though it's a new idea or a good idea, which anyone who knows anything knows it's not! 

This forum is mostly about humor, if you know anything about anything or have eyes and a brain that work. The only reason DaVinci's machine sideways in reverse could have gotten a patent is it's such a bad idea that nobody would have BOTHERED patenting it in the past.  In some ways, we're heading toward greater and greater ignorance!  Well, some of us anyway...

If a guy from Hungary named Gabor is promoting an idea that pops a well-worn red flag on my radar screen, I think it's fun to mention a couple other Gabors from Hungary:

Eva Gabor and Zsa-Zsa Gabor - both fun and glamourous women!  Let's have some fun here!  We can joke around with each other without getting mad about it right? 

If we can't have a little humor when talking about getting our energy by flying gliders in and out of the jet stream liquifying air and delivering it to ground stations, or when viewing a NASA website, in all seriousness, showing a blimp operating in the vacuum of space, when CAN we have a laugh?  No wonder they can't get back to the moon!  All the smart and resourceful people retired!  I mean come on!  You want me to look at a rendering of a blimp in a vaccuum and not say anything?  What you should be asking is "How many supposedly "smart" people agreed with this website and why did it take an idiot like Doug Selsam (me) to say how stupid it was, before they took it down?  I mean, wait, wasn't that something even a third-grader might have noticed?

And if this forum is supposed to have any sort of rigor, it should welcome analysis of ideas presented.  The time to worry would be if someone proposes a complicated scenario for extracting energy from the wind, and nobody comments.  Then you know you have a dead group.  Or if everyone just agrees - then maybe you have a lazy group that is not worth putting any ideas in front of.  Your BEST CASE SCENARIO is a group that rips your idea apart.  That helps to analyze it properly.  A good idea can overcome such scrutiny.  A bad idea may feel challenged. 

A poor reaction is someone promoting an idea then expecting everyone to either just agree, or not question it.  Being called an instant Einstein for coming up with a dubiously complex scenario may feel good momentarily, but in the long run, skeptics are just giving a preview of what Mother Nature will say if the darn thing is ever built, which we know it will not be anyway...  We have to separate ideas that will be built from mere academic self-stimulation.

:)

I have to tell you though, I have a LOT of good ways to do AWE and (I guess it flies in the face of "all roads lead to SuperTurbine(R)) to say that not all of them necessarily have anything to do with a SuperTurbine(R).

Having said that though, any AWE scenario that works well might work even better if duplicated at multiple levels, right?  So even if another way would work well, it might eventually head toward a SuperTurbine type of scenario.  Mostly I just disagree, in may case, with spilling the beans of all my ideas.  if other people can't see it, there is my advantage, frustrating as it may be to wait til I get around to it.  Anyone serious about building systems that work can come and ask me and we can work something out to where they would be making reliable airborne grid electricity in no time.

Roddy, the only mind here remotely capable of making any progress, if only he had any wind energy experience, slowly comes up with ideas that seem to resemble a SuperTurbine(R) more and more with each successive iteration - how long before he is down to merely promoting SuperTurbine(R) itself?  I mean optimize what he's put forth and you have a Superturbine right?  Oh maybe you don't know.  Oh well I think I gotta go - another day is going by!

:)

Doug S.

 Doug you're not going to waste your time prattling on about the mega-whirlygig thing here again are you?

Especially when

https://www.facebook.com/pages/High-altitude-wind-power/305844346101819?fref=ts&rf=142604255757155

is there and waiting for a page moderator.

Seems loads of people like the page but nobody wants to touch it... Bit like the idea of AWE.

But social networking may catch on ... never know

As long as we can network on the internet, I'd get cold feet stepping in LA

Hi Doug,

All roads go to Superturbine,is not it? Yes but Superturbine is hypocritical, because looking at the wind not of face as the conventional turbines but on the bias (alpha angle). But you can take advantage by associating Marlon Brando – Wikipedia (his face looks in at 3/4 like your ST) as advertising metaphoric image.

PierreB

Sure Gabor we LOVE Hungary and Hungarians.

I remember Suzanna Becz who sat in front of me in 3rd grade for instance.

She was a very nice girl an 100% Hungarian.

By the way, is Hungary named after "The Huns"?

I mean does the name "Hungary" mean "The Place of Huns"?

Anyway I always was impressed with Zsa Zsa and Eva.

Eva Gabor is a big name in wigs last I remember.

And I DO like your idea for the gliders in-and-out of the Jet Stream.

It's a great exercise to analyze such scenarios.  You never know when such analysis will lead to something promising.

But I hope you will forvgive me for reminding everyone how easily the topic of wind turbine breakthroughs can slip into a fantasy-land where nothing discussed would ever actually work or even be built.

In any field, we see newcomers enter with typical newbie notions that are already well-known missteps, avoided by the experts.  For instance say your field of expertise was investing:

A newbie comes in and says "My breakthrough strategy is to go to Las Vegas and sit at the roulette table, waiting until black has come up 4 times in a row, then bet on red.  Chances are red will not come up for a fifth time, so the odds are definitely in your favor.  Repeat this every time red or black comes up 4 times in a row and you are on your way to riches!

Does this scenario sound like a good investment strategy?  Why or why not?  But it sounds good to people with no knowledge of economics or statistics, right?  Could you imagine a completely ignorant person coming up with this "investment" idea in the middle of the night?  Lying there in bed congratulating themselves (ahead of the fact) for being "the next financial Einstein"?

Those who know economics or accounting realize that going to Las Vegas is not even part of the topic of "investments", let alone roulette being a good investment.  And the first thing they teach you in statistics class is that previous outcomes do not affect the next random event.  So previous roulette outcomes do not affect the next roulette result.  You probably know this, right?  Why?  Becuase you went to college, right?  And you eralize the purpose of Las Vegas is to take money from mathematically-challenged people who did not have the benefit of a college education, right?  So it's possible to have a whole industry that profits from beginners' ignorance, right?  Pretty simple right?

OK well people who know about wind energy also have some typical newbie mistakes that people with no knowledge of wind energy tend to make over and over again.  And they typically want to congratulate themselves on being "The Next Einstein" before any evidence that they actually HAVE a breakthrough - they just THINK they do.

In your case, with regard to Liquified Air to store energy, you would first face an on-paper assessment of the technology and a comparison to other options.  The fact that even examining it is not welcome is a typical symptom.

But you also said the gliders can use batteries.  Well that might be more promising.  But let's be realistic: maybe the best-case scenario is gliders and equipment WAY too expensive compared to the amount of power they can provide.  Maybe in practice you can't even produce ANY extra power at all!  I don't think we're very close to finding out.

Anyway I asked the real wind energy group where some of the people have even a teeny-tiny idea what the're talking about (unlike here), to ask about the proposed 36x windspeed increase claimed here for an upwwind concentrating funnel/downwind vacuum diffuser funnel.

Well we have to be careful because we real wind people know that any such data is LIKELY to have a Professor Crackpot aspect to it as well - funded to use wind-tunnel time. a professor is looking for a rationalization for that funding, as well as even a temporary title of "Next Einstein", and they are unlikely to have a good background in wind energy, but even so, the best increase in power seems to be about 2 times, which implies maybe a 1.3% increase in speed through the rotor aperture.  

This is just one example of how almost everything discussed here is based on almost 100% ignorance.  To go from saying you can increase wind speed 36 times to being able to increas it only ).3 times is two (2) orders of magnitude wrong.  And that is a simple scenario, not a complicated one like cycling gliders in-and-out of the jet stream.

Maybe your idea for the jet stream is ALSO, similarly, based on misidentifying power opportunities by a couple orders of magnitude or more!  But we will never know unless someone with their feet on the ground rigorously analyzes it.  And they would include rigorous analysis of Liquified Air as energy storage, but before that, analyzing just the glider flights themselves for distances and cycle times expected amounts of energy harvested with each cycle etc. would be in order.

But you see, if we ARE dealing with one more "Professor Crackpot" we would expect him to never address the particular issues at hand.  What we would expect would be a series of (twisting and squirming) diatribes about how ignorant (bad) the people questioning the idea are, and attempts to distract and redirect the conversation to unrelated topics like Giraffes, being Hungarian, other innovations from Hungarian people, etc.  The key factor is to always avoid actually analyzing the proposed idea.  As long as nobody analyzes it, the promoter can keep saying they are "The Next Einstein".

:)

Doug S.

Here is a link of rotating kite http://youtu.be/0GflQyDDQec .According to my measures the kite turning on itself produces about 2/3 or 3/5 the force it makes with large crosswind figures. Such a system would be a rell-in/out.   The maximization of space would be easier for a farm.

Observations?

PierreB                            

http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/airbornewindenergy/conversations/messages/7779 

Dear Dave S.

Well if I do report any progress it won't be jumping out of a camper before it blows over.

That shows you have really made some great progress over the years.

A true mastery of the wind!

I have to say two things:

1) I am glad you did not get hurt - I was kidding about Mother Nature getting another chance.

2) My opinion is all your activity is "churning" - aimless activity without meaningful results.  Maybe "flailing" would be a better word.  It does sound like you are having fun which is a good thing.

As far as me building more and talking less:

I agree - I need to get out and start building again - often instead of posting here!

I was really dumb to snooze on a multimillion-dollar offer that come in before the economic crash.

I mean, I GUESS I was dumb - hard to say really.

But that offer was from the guy who had crafted the most wind energy power-purchase agreements in the U.S the year before... An actual wind energy executive.

Remember the first airborne wind energy conference?

Here was my thinking before throwing the PopSci flying SuperTurbine demo into the van and coming up to Chico / Oroville:

The background was I had already noticed that jumping on flight after flight to attend conference after conference after trade show had not really resulted in any progress.  In fact it had taken a lot of money, time, and attention that could have been used to develop products.

Same with the California Energy Commission grant - all it did was force me to build an expensive demo.  Sure it got a lot of attention and recognition, but little actual progress other than generally building up my internal database of things that work well, and things that don't.  Then you realize if you're EVER going to sell turbines you need a 100% reliable model or you will go out of business like almost ALL wind turbine companies.

Still, I thought it would be important to bring a working system to the first AWE conference, so all the big players could see a working example of propellers in the air generating electricity.  I had no idea I'd be the only one bringing a working model.  And I had no idea that there would be nobody there making any sense whatsoever.  I thought maybe we'd have some serious talent there, maybe with some funding, that would say "Hey this actually WORKS and was easy to set up and flies automatically, and it only cost a few hundred bucks, compared to other systems that require a babysitter and cost way more!!  Maybe we should pursue some of Doug's ideas!"

But what I found instead was a Wanye German-talk-fest where Wayne interrupted every speaker to talk about low level jets and dual-tethered gliders microwaving power to Earth.  Instead of people telling him to shut up and stop interrupting everyone, it seemed as though the audience was transfixed with Wayne and winning a "Germie award". 

The thing that really got me was the wind turbine spinning in the distance each day.  I kept thinking how a room full of wind energy people would have been placing bets on what size or brand of machine it was, unable to contain their curiosity.  At least one person would have HAD to drive over and check it out at lunch or something to settle the betz - er um I mean bets.  There's no way real wind people could have ignored that operating turbine for two days.  But instead, the operating wind turbine in the distance never received a single mention from anyone!  It may as well have been a fire-hydrant or a light-pole or radio-tower, or just a barn.  To the people at the conference, a working wind turbine was just a part of the rural landscape.  With no experience in wind energy, and no interest in how power is actually made in wind energy, a working turbine held absolutely no interest for the assembled crowd!  I was thinking "You can't make this stuff up!"

So, on the one hand I realized it was just one more wasted week.  But on the other hand it got SuperTurbine(R) in a few more newspapers etc. 

The only thing was I had already realized:

All the press in the world means NOTHING.  It's a waste of energy, time, and resources unless you can leverage it to investment and progress. What's one more "green-energy press-release breakthrough?"  They are almost all full-of-crap, right?  I guess I had decided I wanted to develop RELIABLE wind energy solutions, and as long as I was swimming in hype and "people-pleasing" I would be too distracted to develop reliable models.

So the last couple years I concentrated on getting a single small turbine model to be 100% reliable.  We stopped burning out generators over a year ago (too much power sometimes!).  Now I think we've finally got a reliable turbine.

When you contrast my effort out of a garage and a couple of super-punishing test sites, against, say, Honeywell, relegated to believing the lies of one more "Professor Crackpot". investing millions of dollars for a typical newbie wannabe-wind-energy-inventor's fantasy agglomeration of all the known beginner missteps, I'd say I'm doing pretty good.  Not too much money wasted, and no super-dumb turbines out there showing how dumb I can be.

Then you are back here where people want to sit around talking up the Honeywell turbine arguing that it is "good".  Oh well, ignorance of wind energy is almost everywhere.  Very few people know anything about it!  Knowledge is found in a few select places.

Have a day!

:)

Doug S.

For this configuration (rotating kite) the generator is at ground, working according to the well-known scheme reel/out-reel/in.

PierreB

Inflatable shaft has been a topic in this forum,the problem being drag,the tower leaning due to the force of the wind.

PierreB

Hey Dave S.

Sounds like you'd like to keep pretending that real wind energy experts don't exist, that Airborne Wind Energy is somehow not wind energy, and that none of what has been learned in 3000 years applies to you so you can keep ignoring it.

If I see someone claiming that fabric shroud will increase a 20 mph wind to supersonic speeds, I am gonna analyze that factually.  You may have no standards for anything remotely approaching factuality or feasibility, but some people do.  I don't think we've touched on the fabric's response to being in a supersonic flow have we?  Why don't you address that then. 

You want to know who wind energy experts are?  Try being involved in the field of wind energy and you will learn who they are!   It's a small world.  All you're doing is making excuses.

Nobody in this group has any idea what they are doing or what they are talking about, and you are the prime example.

The problem involves 3 things:

1) Earth with a gravity field

2) The moving atmosphere held in that gravity field.

3) The power grid willing to pay 4 cents/kWh more or less depending...

Not that complicated

I don't see anyone addressing these very well yet.

Additionally there are subsystems and sub-problems that would be required for an economical, working system.  I don't see anyone even identifying, let alone working on, any of these subsystems or subproblems. 

Typical wannabe wind-energy-inventor newbies have no clue and should get up to speed on what is known before trying to say they are improving it.

Again, you are a poster-child for wasting all your enthusiasm and energy to get no results.

You can castigate me all you want but it won't help.  It comes down to you and the wind.  Are you getting results or just having your camper blown over?  Why don't you calculate the power during your camper incident, claim a new world record, and have Joe Faust create a new excuse-category for "airborne wind energy" - "relocating recreational vehicles".  Wait maybe that's a subcategory of flying yachts.   Once again, your work is done!  Once again, you've conquered the field. 

As far as getting no real results in airborne wind energy, nobody else can be blamed, as hard as you may want to try.  It's just you, the Earth, the atmosphere, and the grid.  And you are powerless to integrate the other three.  You think the relevant factors are you, the internet, the other ignorant people, and say, our Cub-Scout denmother/patron saint Christina Archer for example.  Nope, it's not a popularity contest, not a personality contest, just you, the earth, the atmosphere, and the grid.  Have fun with that.

You endlessly obfuscate, trying to pretend you;re solving the AWE challenge.  You keep trying to substitute related fields such as kite-fishing, charging a celphone one time, or kite-sailboats, with lowering the price of commercially-produced wind energy by taking it skyward.  You make excuses for others making no progress.  Wonderful - a mutual, excuse-driven, lack-of-effort with a resultant lack of results.

By the way if you do get in touch with real wind energy experts, be ready - I'M ONE OF THE NICE ONES!  Most of them wouldn't bother even talking to you!  Or they would just start yelling.  They are mostly SICK OF ENDLESS CRACKPOTS WHO THINK THEY ARE EXPERTS.

Have a dull and unproductive day.

:)

(Imagine if they said that at Burger King?)

When they tell me "Have a nice day!" I ask "The whole day?"

I tell them that sounds too hard,

"Can I try for half a day first?" 

gee thanks!

• Joe K. made Supersonic parachute jump
  
• Schlieren Movies of Decelerators at Supersonic Speeds
  
• 
  

Rotary Recovery Systems

Airborne Wind Energy Systems Beyond Electricity Generation

Wind powered energy storage and synthetic fuel plant designs are unveiled at Airborne Wind Energy Conference, September 10-11.

Leo established a strong presence in the article 

with the PDF: 

http://www.prweb.com/pdfdownload/11101401.pdf 

And 

AWECS WITH FAST MOTION TRANSFER

 http://www.awelabs.com/awelabs-awecs-proposal/

Does it have a laugh track?

Is it titled "How NOT to do AWE?"

For ages phased tugging of kite systems have increased the total energy of the kite system to maintain the wings into flight when wind becomes insufficient for flight.  We have had various terms for  the input process, the increase of kinetic and potential energy caused by phased tugging or reverse pumping.   At conference a research is using these terms: 

reverse pumping of kite systems

kinetic-charge phase

potential transfer phase

kite-system total energy

Kittenger again?