Solar-Energy Kite Systems

Hey Joe:
Is this stuff a year old or what?
Whenever I see a picture of a whole group of people posing for a picture in front of a kite, it reminds me of a green business I know of that refuses to get off the ground, year after year.  The initial "impressive team photo" fell by the wayside after that team turned out to be a bunch of goofs.  The next team turned out to bee a bunch of moneywasting jokers too.  The problem is concentrating on appearances rather than developing solutions.
The picture of the group of people is supposed to communicate to the world:
See how many capable-looking people we have on this task?  How could we possibly fail, with all those people?  It reminds me of "How many XXX does it take to screw in a lightbulb?", except it seems to me the teams, collectively, have yet to understand HOW to screw in a lightbulb.  They don;t even understand it has threads and needs to be turned into place.  Instead they develop a lightbulb gun and try to shoot the bulb into place.  When I see the big team like that, with all those credentials and fancy photos, and all they are doing is reeling kites in and out, I hear a laughtrack.  All these teams talk about is how many grad students they have doing X or Y, and it all seems meaningless.  What I see is small bureaucracies, trying to "force progress", or "force a breakthrough", as in "pushing a rope" by hoping that somehow if they can take a picture with enough students in it, some valid inspiration will naturally emerge.  But I doubt it.  The bureaucracy is pushing them to waste a lot of time on ideas that do not pass the initial assessment tests of fundamentals, let alone look promising, in my opinion.  I don't see much of any knowledge from either wind energy, nor aviation being applied, just mostly kite-flying.  It's a weak attempt, almost characteristic of desperation, except if people were truly desperate they might find a way to start pursuing configurations that are more likely to actually work, in developing a more economical form of wind energy.

When I see the kite-reelers, it reminds me of when a dog tries to go through a door that is balanced to naturally close.  If the dog is going in the direction where the door swings away, and he catches the door in an unlatched state, such as when someone has just gone through the door and it has not yet latched, the dog can be successful.  He pushes through the door.  The door complies.  However, if the dog is coming from the direction where the door swings toward the dog, good luck.  The dog, having no hands, doesn't understand how to pull the door open.  And if he catches the door partway open, he can't understand that if he used his nose to push the door to the side, he could momentarily have time to rush through the door.  Unfortunately, the dog can't really think it through.  He operates mostly on emotion.  He doesn't grasp that the door will grab him and stop him.  So if he wants to go through the door, all he can really understand is pushing his way through, because that is what he is used to.  Push your way toward where you want to go.  A simple formula that usually works, except when one encounters a door that swings toward you.  Then instead of pushing your way through the door, you must first pull the door, then go through.  To me, I see a similar dynamic with the kite-reelers.  Like the dog being used to pushing its way to go where it needs to go, the kite-reelers are simply used to the idea that a kite pulls on a string, and they seem unable to think beyond that basic fact that they are used to.  They can talk about wind energy.  They can talk about aviation.  But all they do is go back to what their primitive instincts can understand, given their limited experience, flying kites.  Like the cave-man with a spear who might not stumble across the bow-and-arrow for a million years, or the dog who gets stuck trying to go through the door "the wrong way", the kite-reelers are floundering.  I wish someday I would see a dog use its nose to simply swing the door aside, and quickly go through it.  I always wonder if the dog might ever figure that out.  And I wonder what it will take for the kite-reelers to try something more likely to work.  Well, they at least can produce photos of large groups of grad students standing in front of a kite.

Doug, ... many years.  Pride in teaming in experiments and in learning. Honorable activity. Participants are making personal breakthroughs; imaginations are spinning, progress for them occurs. Honing craft and skills seems to be a joyous thing. Recording the early steps in a team's project is part of the party. Any one certain team's project may not be part of some future "winner" but the wins are plenty in honest learning and exploring scenes. Out of the growing Era K3 will emerge sparkling successes, but the early youthful successes will be seen as the soil out of which some beautiful flowers will eventually arrive. 

Pop. Mech., April 1913, p. 579 held a kite system, a train with two sets of wings. One set gave the main lift and line tautness; the other set was working to give travel to the man-holding basket. 

Attachments :

Aerosail Mouv-up.jpg

Oh well we can just give up now then I suppose
http://www.concepttec.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=18&Itemid=128

Roderick Read
15a Aiginish
Isle of Lewis
HS2 0PB
kitepowercoop.org

Yeah weaving machines pioneered in the UK was the catalyst to industrialize the world.  Ever look at the weave of your T-shirt up close and try to figure out how long it would take your great aunt to knit it by hand?  T-shirts are totally taken for granted, but are really a miracle of technology.  When I was in college, taking a course in "basket-weaving" was a "standard joke", implying one was wasting one's time at university with third-world caveman obsolete technology.  But then when you consider the importance of weaves in composite parts, we probably NEED some really smart engineers who actually specialize in weaving.  (I wish I would have taken basket-weaving - not sure if it was actually offered where I was.)
I've found filament-wound carbon fiber driveshafts to work well for SuperTurbines(R), for example.  Structurally, the idea is very similar to your latest, and very nicely done, woven Superturbine(R) renderings.  What we try and accomplish in real life is to make a machine that will stand the test of time, and not get bogged down or imbalanced by ice, tumbleweeds, etc. which tend to get tangled in anything tangleable.  With a filament-wound driveshaft, the individual "tethers" transmit torque helically down the shaft.  Depending on the scale, the shaft can be an open lattice.
:)
Doug S.

Thanks Joe:
If flowers are eventually going to bloom, they need dirt, so you are saying the current photos are photos of the dirt.  I don't think the current photos show dirt planted with the correct seeds that will bear fruit.  You can't grow daffodils by planting potatoes.  (You need Jack-and-the-beanstalk seeds, which, unfortunately, are fictional) :)

I remember a friend of mine started a green company.  It was all about finding some "team" that supposedly "knew what they were doing", since my friend had not mastered the technology per se.  The moment I saw the pic of this "team" on his website, (really just a company he had hired), I said to myself "How long before he takes the pic down and tells me how terrible the "team" was?  (It turned out to be about a year.) 

Another day he called me and said "I'm at the gym working out with my "director of sales"!  (I was supposed to be impressed.)  I remember thinking: "So that is how you think you are going to be successful, going to the gym with some chick that you give the title "director of sales"?  Wait, let me guess, she has no sales background in your field, she has not sold one product yet, and never will, right?  Right.  Endless window-dressing. 

I know what happened because it happened to me early on: you see all these lying websites (Whalebumps etc.) promising instant success that will never happen, and think that is the game and you need a lying website too, to keep up with all the other liars out there.  (At that point you don't quite realize you are seeing almost 100% lies).  So instead of developing a product you develop lying websites that talk about how "green" you really are, as opposed to other companies who just "pretend to be green."  Like "We are better liars than the other websites". 

The common theme is the teams have no idea how to really make economical wind power so they just show "the team" and "their kite".  The caption should say "See, collectively we all don't know what we're doing, together, so we just fly kites!  Look at our kite!  Pretty big, eh?"  And I say websites, rather than companies, because so many have no real company at all, mostly just a website.  Statements like "We don't just talk green, we really live it."  You know... 

So my friend kept going through teams and team members and despite winning millions in grants, that effort is now almost bankrupt, because of a focus on appearances rather than the product.  He is now telling me "I see what you have been trying to tell me."  I only hope he can get past the damage his poorly-chosen "teams" have caused to his effort, since he has a great idea and has produced and sold 2 units in something like 5 years now.

And that is a guy with a straightforward product using standard, known technology, not someone chasing an entirely new art while running in the entirely wrong direction.
:)

Selsam Pipe down.
I had the honour in a previous job of helping prepare parts for an adult learning disabled basket weaving therapy session.

Long ago, Basket weaving became a non pc derogatory term for referring to the future employment of army shell shock sufferers.

Selsam pipe down
Maybe that's what I should call thon sketch.

Got a nice geared up Mothra to draw if you don't behave.

Roderick Read
15a Aiginish
Isle of Lewis
HS2 0PB
kitepowercoop.org

DougS,

I see.You prefer speaking about photos, universities reeling, "Crackpot" and "newbies" instead making ST towards evolutions. You are between two chairs: in real wind energy as nonconformist inventor; in airborne wind energy as the advocate of real wind energy.You need a red cloth. So probably Rod will return to Mothra, while I will praise reeling, oscillating, liquid-air, Mothra, Honeywell, drag systems, global warming, margarine, whale bumps, universities, professors...

 

PierreB 

Oh No!  I'm being psycho-anal-ized!  :)  That's not Bill Gates' wife in the pic though, that is my girlfriend.  He was nice to take a pic with us cuz we happened to be hangin' with some people whose parents had just been playing Bridge with him in Nebraska.  Notice the shirt he is wearing - probably custom-stitched just for him!  He had just arrived for a 2-day stay in a "black helicopter" for a meeting of the top minds in the world.  Shhh, don't tell anyone.  It must have been a mistake that they invited me!  Let;s see Dean Kamen was there, Eric Schmidt of Google, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, John Doerrr and Bill Joy of Kleiner Perkins, Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute.  A bunch of us hung out at the bar.  That Jeff Bezos seemed to always be laughing.  Wonder why?  We all had meetings and classes and dinners and stuff.  Went hiking in some beautiful mountains..  It was fun.   :)) By the way it is finally raining here, and it is very windy.  I just saw a couch blow by.  The 10 kW turbine keeps going offline from making too much power, whereupon it starts making a lot of noise up there, bang bang bang bang! as the unloaded blades whack the air - one blade has a leading edge tape blem I can hear, and I have to hit "reset" on the inverter (when I am here to do it, and I happen to notice) so it can engage the grid again, and get loaded down and get quieter.  Uh-oh it is raining super hard out there - better check and make sure everything is OK.

Working kite systems that have their resistive wing set below as moving anchors that are specialized wings that plow soil, scrape ice, mark the earth, up-end remnant war mines, harvest crops, dig trenches, clear fields, etc. form an AWES realm yet to be robustly described.   AWES move bodies, yachts, ships, water, material in pick-and-place, but AWES may also plow the soil, scrape the lands, scour water surfaces, scrape firebreaks, drag carpets to pick up goat's head plant seeds, paint broad portions of earth surface, ...  

Maybe have an event in indoor windless kiting: 

This is funny
A threat that the future of ST depends on my input.
We would do well to remember I am only a 1 man input.
I'd be delighted if any organisation took my designs for study / development / production / test or other.
There's only so much a househusband can do

Roderick Read
15a Aiginish
Isle of Lewis
HS2 0PB
kitepowercoop.org

I don't know what "thon sketch" is, but yeah, you might as well draw some more mothras now.

Yeah Pierre that pretty much sums it up.
We're witnessing a lot of wasted time that will lead nowhere.
Just a bunch of crapola lying "press-release science" backed up by "evidence consisting mostly of obligatory group photos that, like whale bumps, sounds great because it is all just a fantasy.
I am here for anyone who really wants to do AWE.
Just get ahold of me.

The vast literature on designing rotors for conventional wind provide a starting base for rotors to be used in AWES. Robust awareness of what is known about rotors could be a spawning arena for solutions helpful in kited rotors. AWES rotors will face challenges that are distinct from towered rotors. Rotors for flygen will hold considerations distinct from rotors in groundgen AWES.  Launching, landing, deploying, dynamics of kite-energy systems and the effects on the rotor means, ultralight construction tactics, ROI and rotors lofted in kite-energy systems, rotor mounting means, sensors and status, control, certified performance, comparisons, safety at all points of operation, niche applications, scale,   ... 

Ok Doug. So here are some elements towards a crackpotization of SuperTurbine(R). Interview of the CEO:

• In your novel rethinking of SuperTurbine you implement reel-in/out method, why?
• I follow the recommendations of great universities.
• How do you describe your design?
• Rotors are like individuals within a group of whales, being as plates of baleen. Whales in nature has been well studied to provide some algorithms allowing a real simulation of optimized SuperTurbine.
• Why do you implement rings around rotors?
• Honeywell has proved "rim drive" transmission is more productive: low rotation involves in less problems for birds. 
• When superturbine will be marketed?
• According to a first range of results from simulations, we expect it for next year.
• But the last year I asked you the same question, for the same answer as " next year"?
• It is the politics of our company that not to break the fixed purpose. So the answer is for ever: next year.

PierreB

Wait, rotors?  I thought the answer was kites!  Intermittently pulling on the string!  Why are you talking about rotors?  Sounds like an unwanted and irrelevant term from the completely unrelated art of wind energy to me.  I think you should just stick with "kites".  Pulling.  Ya know.  There is a lot of promise in that.  I mean, you HAVE seen the group photos of the "teams" in front of their kites, right?  These are educated people.  In large numbers no less.  They take a great photo.  They have promised fantastic results.  So why question it by mentioning rotors?  Let's stick to factual solutions like bose-einstein phonons, K?

Wow Roddy thanks for illustrating for us, once again, in case we missed the last thousand examples, how "Professor Crackpot" operates.  I noticed in the animated video, the cascade of turbines just keeps making more and more power from the same small amount of head, ultimately returning the water to the original height, as though the power magically comes from nowhere.  The technical buzzword that rationalizes it all: "kinetic energy".  They used a "science" word, so that "proves it works". 
This is the typical crap Professor Crackpot comes up with: adding a second turbine inline to "force" the first turbine to make more power, which, of course, powers that same second turbine.  I get about one of these a week by telephone or e-mail.  Often it's in the form of an electric car powered by onboard wind turbines that are powered by the carls movement, which is of course powered by the windmills - well, you get the idea.  Continuous loops of things powering other things, all apperently utilizing some sort of "reverse friction" where instead of each stage having some inefficiency, the Professor Crackpot systems ADD power at each stage - from absolutely nowhere!  The original power from the water at a certain height becomes a mere formality when its time to magically pump the water back up to its original height.  I usually try to tell these misguided people it's like thinking you can fly by pulling up on your own shoelaces, but I get the impression they never understand what I am saying.  Gosh, I wish I were dumb enough to make up stuff like this.  Amazing.

The topic concerns kite systems that have parts called rotors. 

  Review: Recall Moshe Meller's kited rotors.

Rotor integrated in body of kytoon: 

http://www.energykitesystems.net/MosheMeller/index.html  Moshe hopes to get the electricity down the tether!

Thanks for remembering, Joe.
I do think this "laddermill" style configuration might have the capability to deliver surprising success.  Hard to say without building them.  And Ockels had no way to know I had already come up with the idea.  What surprised me was how they seemed to give up on it immediately without ever trying it, then quickly degenerate to mere kite-flying and reel-pulling, while still CALLING it a laddermill, but without ever having tried a laddermill.  Puzzling. (Picture Mr. Spock lifting one eyebrow...)  But hey, maybe getting a good group picture is more important than building a laddermill.  "Here's our new invention, now we're going to fly kites!"  (?)  I can say there are aspects of laddermill that would probably surprise a first-time builder, and they would quickly find certain constraints to a version that could work properly.  You'd probably have to see one actually working to see what it needed next to be improved, and at some point one might have something that worked pretty well, IMHO.

I can point to several somewhat similar versions tried: ground-based sideways and tower-based vertical.  The sideways ground-based one was in Tehachapi at Oak Creek windfarm and as I recall had the (proto-?)typical problem of self-destructing when some real winds came up.  The vertical version I just ran across a couple days ago in my shop.  Some convincing-sounding literature in the form a very well-printed pamphlet and a matching packaged CD, both with great graphics.  The problem(s) the vertical one had was an obvious "Professor Crackpot" at the helm.  Just reading the literature, it resembled the "Professor Crackpot" humorous-hydro system that Roddy showed us as a joke the other day.  Way too many moving parts and an complete obliviousness of the actual factors that would manifest if the darn thing were actually runnning.  Obviously they knew no wind-power theory.  Their stated principle of operation violates what is known about wind turbines as charaterized by Betz.  By the way, the key factor in that humorous-hydro perpetual-motion machine was the holding tank.  Why did it need a tank in the first place if the tubing just returned the water to the tank?  Why not just attach the exit tube to the entry tube and call it a day?  Imagine that: fooled by your own imaginary tank!  I guess you can render anything and it may mean nothing.  That is an example of why I call these people "Crackpots".  What they come up with, in this case, not only violates the laws of physics, but even if it didn't, makes no sense whatsoever.  What purpose would the tank have besides throwing away whatever momentum the exiting water still had, after being magically lifted back up to its original. height, after doing all that work?  I would say the people inventing that hydro system should go to school, but I'll bet they already went to school, just never paid much attention.  No excuse.  Perpetual motion was covered in high school physics.

Hey Dave S.
That was a great funny one from Roddy, and the ability to see how silly these goofy lying websites are is relevant to AWE,where most every idea promoted is almost as unlikely to work as this humorous fantasy-hydro rendering Roddy showed us.  The AWE ideas are almost as dumb, just maybe you can't see it.
Now imagine yourself trying to explain to the insistent promoter of the fantasy-hydro system that he cannot take the same energy from a flow of water over and over and then magically have all that energy still left in the flow.  Obviously he will never comprehend what you're trying to tell him no matter how you try to explain it, so his only answer will probably be something like: "Yeah they said the same thing to The Wright Brothers, you intolerant know-it-all jerk!".
Are you getting the picture yet?
When someone is a certain amount of dumb, they are too dumb for anyone to explain to them how dumb they are.  Get it yet?  Oh wait, given what I just said, I guess not.  See, that is a real Catch-22.  In so many fields we find, you usually can't explain to an idiot that they are an idiot.  Maybe that is actually some physical law of nature.  Like you can't debate a rock, right?  I guess it comes down to some sort of inviolability threshold of an impenetrable cranial density factor.

It would be neat if the Ockels group constrained "Laddermill" to something that had more than one rung to it; maybe they will do that for our realm one day.   

A well established folk-belief in sports kiting is that smaller parafoils fly fastest. It sure looks that way, to see the little wings dart about, but is it really true? If this were true, it would drive down the maximum size of an optimal AWES unit parafoil.*

Several factors tend toward a perceptual illusion of faster small kite speed. Parallax and detail scaling cues are absent. The very smallness of a given kite makes it seem faster at the same speed as a larger kite. Small kites have relatively less structural and internal air mass, by cubic scaling law, so they accelerate and turn much faster. Smaller kites are typically flown on shorter lines, with much less distance across the kite window. A larger kite on shorter lines lacks distance in the power-zone to accelerate fully.

There is an optimal size range for the fastest kite. Too small, and the kite clearly suffers from relatively increased viscous drag. Too large, and excess cubic mass again saps the kite's L/D. Current AWES models include large slow single-skin lifter wings hosting many smaller possibly sweeping wings as the harvesters.

The issue remains open. It seems as if there is a broad size range over which parafoils operate with similar speed potentials, with the highest speeds likely attained by kites larger than perceptual illusions suggest. The one number that predicts the fastest kite is the highest ratio of real-to-apparent-wind-velocity (equivalent to HAWT tip-speed-ratio or aircraft velocity-to-sink-rate-ratio).


* We disregard here the complex economic and safety comparisons between distinct AWES wing types (from single-skin to rigid-foils).

My problems with your post are:
1) Can you ever stop with the "What Doug failth to underthtand" line?
2) You have debated that the answer to AWE will be soft cloth kites, pulling strings, over and over, to counter my predictions that gyrocopters, or at least hard turbine blades will predominate.  Now it seems that you want to just claim any and every solution to be "a kite", just to rationalize a domain name that contains the word "kite", and to make it sound like "you were right all along". 

Do you think nobody here remembers me endlessly saying it will be about rotors spinning, and you saying no it will be all about kites pulling?  Oscillating?  Running crankshafts on the ground?  Oscillating like phonons?  Remember?  (Is it working yet?) 

As usual, rather than come up with any actual solutions, you think the rest of us are dumb enough to believe that whatever solution anyone ELSE comes up with, if successful, you are legitimately pre-positioned just rename it as something you said all along, whether or not it completely violates almost every statement you've made over the years.  I'm just saying nobody is going to fall for it.  Have fun attempting to "re-define" your way to "success".

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