I'll try and offer a desperate hypothetical argument for spinning,
Please shoot this down if it's not going to fly

A kite lifted tether like a Super turbine. Could have, instead of a darius blade, a side by side string of small short tether kites, twisted to point down the main kite tether line slightly, therby providing lift and rotation to a tether sheath.

It would still have to fit onto a stiff enough rotating tether sheath / cuff,
and would be running, downwind rather than classically across as per darius.


Kites on downwind side of sheath would suffer lack of lift... but that avoids the whole setup pulling down... net overall lift?

Am I talking mince or not?

Dare I offer more support? yes.
Again, please shoot. devils advocate in progress.

As for towers being a problem...
Assuming a tower was to be made to rotate vertically with the tether, and made of a set of inflated towers, filled with tall inflated cells all arranged on a vertical axis rotating ring, ...

There would be a pressure variance inside the tower as the tower rotated and compressed on the downwind side air bags, assuming enough lift from the top tether kite, ... would it be infeasible to extract this same energy from the tower which holds it up under static conditions?

It would not be infeasible, just uneconomic, like a Rube Goldberg machine.  The variation in air pressure would be miniscule, and the wear high.  

"As most experienced designers will tell you, any major requirement for torsional strength and stiffness in a structure is apt to be a curse and a blight.  It puts up the weight and expense and altogether provides a quite disproportionate amount of trouble and anxiety to the engineer."

Yeah, you're probably on the ball with that Call thanks Bob,
even still... I though I'd make another pretty dreamy picture of my hypothesis.... In my photos folder

Thanks again Bob,
Now Rube Goldberg machines, there is a cool use for some of my designs.
Must re-watch that OK Go video on you tube, "this too shall pass"
good use of umbrella power if I remember.

Oh the way some people spend their time.

Dave,
Have you considered modularly expandable arrays? e.g. whereby extra kites put on the line, can be flown up the outside tethers of lofted kites. each kite to have a ring below it's LHS tether point and a sprung clip carib type connector below it's RHS tether.

This way, large arrays can be rigged in the air on expandable gang lines, gang lines combined etc...

You're probably way ahead of that.

This is all too predictable.
As I said a couple years ago, the best place to start is at lower altitudes/heights from the ground. Also that all roads lead to Superturbine(R) I laid out several great ways to do AWE quite a while ago and nobody cares.

Of course I was "completely full-of-it", told that the tradewinds were the place for the "smart people", "well-funded teams" to target.
Yeah the tradewinds, sure, you can operate there but you don't have the skills to operate at 100 feet or 1000 feet right?
Well well well, now they've mentally descended down to 1000 feet or so. (Hey come down the Earth, will you?)
Basically all you are seeing is P.R. squirming, backing off of initial claims.

Here's how it goes in wind energy, with regard to "press-release breakthroughs":
1) Extraordinary claims are made of the superiority of the new technology over existing technology. Almost without exception the people making the extraordinary claims have NO experience in wind energy.

2) The effort goes forward and the extraordinary claims are repeated, but as reality slowly sets in, some aspects of the super-hyped claims start to deteriorate.

3)It becomes apparent at some point that there is nothing to the claims: no implementation turns out to make more power for less money. In fact they often have trouble making useful power at all.

4) The teams experience every model and every prototype being destroyed as soon as Mother Nature decides to really BLOW.

5) For turbines using blades and lift, they sell a few or sometimes many and the company goes down due to warranty claims on failed turbines. For more whacky designs using drag and/or cloth, there are usually few if any sold, and no examples of decent output or economics emerge.

6) They eventually go away without so much as a whimper after wasting as much as about 20 million or so.

So now they are down to 1000 feet. (but they seemed so sure about that tradewinds thing! And so dismissive of lower altitudes!)

OK just a little reality-check
AWE descending fast.
At this rate of descent they should hit the ground pretty fast fairly soon.

Meanwhile we have unprecedented early October snow predicted in the local ski slopes near Los Angeles. Geez we bought season passes on sale last weekend at Big Bear, knowing that with "global warming" now having had time to really set in, we were probably wasting our money. (he he he) I mean, how could it still even snow near L.A. after 25 years of "global warming"?

"Yeth welll Douglath, apparently you haven't heard that climate change - could we call it climate change pleath? Climate change involveth exthtreme weather of all kinds!

(Oh geez sorry!) I keep bringing up reality and what you said BEFORE in the LAST lie...

A panicked NREL "scientist" (almost in tears!) told me we wouldn't even HAVE skiing in COLORADO within just a few years (no snow), a few years ago (?), in June, while skiing at a special NREL ski trip.
Yup you got that right - an NREL ski trip in June with the inside info from a "scientist" that soon there would be no more snow even in winter. mmm hmmmm.
Meanwhile we are ready for the next glacial period of the present ice-age (check the facts).

As we used to say in NY:
"Whadda bunch of Maroons!"

:)
Doug Selsam

PS I'm gonna borrow a saying here - some of you may know where it came from in the 1980's:
"AWE (in some forms) is God's way of saying you have too much money"

Oh I totally agree array lines are the potential standard, a lifting work horse.
for "a suitable custom spring grapple" I had imagined a corkscrewing top with a sprung internal gate lever / snap shackle (sorry I said carib)

A single halyard weight for each link may be more than a remote solenoid. A shared halyard could be useful in triggering small sequential group releases as backup. Is that what "Sam Cody's cool old trick" is?

Flying spare lines through rings up existing line is elegant and robust and a solid technological basis. There is huge scope beyond simplicity for service kites.

Blade pitch / AoA / sheeting, True It's where the power comes in. Certainly on live windsurf controls a soft luffing head easily spills and smooth control. Similarly Over or under sheeting allows inneficient wind use in overpowered conditions.

rod

DaveS,

Generally your posts are very interesting,but the forum could be yet
more interesting if Makani,Joby,SkyWind Power,and other AWE companies
wanted to post on.

PierreB


--- In AirborneWindEnergy@yahoogroups.com, dave santos <santos137@... wrote:
correct error. It is a positive use of AWE expertise to point out errors
in the popular press.
errors and is going to request corrections be printed. It may be that
all good AWE developers collectively deserve a more principled
Breakthrough Award, once PM's factual imbalances and MP conflicts of
interest are corrected, which is a positive take on the present case.
standards. Make no mistake, PM is substantially advertising to children
for weapons systems; a key recruitment tool the major advertiser, the US
military. Perhaps such social analysis drives certain observers away,
but serious developers are emotionally hardy, or miss key art as it
emerges first on this Forum.
to learn your engineering take on new AWE dev, since you work with
complex expensive UAV tech at Hood. Your sudden post suggests you may
even have direct knowledge of certain "stealth VC" AWE efforts that
prefer to hide behind veils of silence or hype. We are actually seeing
some progress in open circles toward bold concepts your dad pioneered.
Please do present a positive contribution to the AWE forum,

I hate to stand up for my beloved friend Dave S. on this one but, as aggravating as I may sometimes find his posts, he is saying what he thinks and has an extremely active imagination and level of participation.

One of the worst things that sterilized the "regular" wind energy yahoo group was basically censorship: people deciding which topics are OK and whose viewpoints should be heard.

For example, in standing behind Dave S. ideas expressed here, I had just been thinking of posting my opinion that even though I have so many patents in this field, there is something to the idea that patents can seem to stifle innovation rather than nurture it.

Rather than everyone jumping in and expressing all their ideas and creating one big virtual machine and then it gets built, the people with the solutions hold back, figuring they'd better file more patents before disclosing what may be true solutions ready to roll out, but then maybe they can't afford the time or money at that moment, and so progress stands still.

Similarly rather than working together on ideas, well-funded companies feel fenced off by each others' patents and assume in advance that a cooperative relationship is not so much de jour as a tight-lipped grind to exploit ones own patents, file more, and sometimes the energy could be better spent building and testing.

On the other hand what makes a tree taller than slime mold on the rocks? They both photosynthesize the same area. One is majestic and grand, the other is less impressive. The difference? Dead wood. The dead wood that makes a tree a tree, may be like the tree of patents.

But I don't know, it would be interesting to see what technological leaps we might make if there were a patent holiday or a parallel universe where we could all jump in and build something together, including NASA and everybody. A fantasy? Well everything starts with a fantasy.

Anyways like the rest I am sad to see Mr. Steve Jobs go. That is a sad day. We should carry on his spirit of innovation.
:)
Doug S.

Penicillin only achieved production when the government forced all the companies working on it to share their work.  The Patent system needs a complete re-thinking.  With the 'net, we can track down the first person to post an idea, and the people who added factors to make a project work, and reward them from taxes on older successful innovations.

The telephone and the radio technology, in which Italian scientists have played opposite roles, with Meucci and Marconi against Bell and Tesla, teaches different stories.

May be it could be interesting to study the case of an Italian company, Ferrero, against the China giant, for the Rocher chocolate. Also Philip Glass action against Honda company and in general to protect his compositions has to be evaluated

Leonardo Chiariglione, the scientist that working in CSELT has contributed to the development of the digital compression techniques, could have to say something interesting about this topic.

"Well Ah'm only here fur the banter"
Please never let the film guys find who first quoted that.

First quote I got today for making a rubber ring £695+VAT
stinger... oooh ya

Thank goodness for the common sense and swim soaked brain of my wife who suggested an inflated pool ring, and to amazon, ebay, google and a company fittingly called bestway for introducing me to the

Bestway Inflatable Atomic Bouncer - Trampoline

Doug, you're up on it. you mentioned everyone actively jumping in,,, you were thinking trampoline all along.

Written to bestway to see if they can make a lighter version.

Can't wait to rip some kites in half.

And lastly, sadly, RIP S Jobs.

DaveS,

"Formal computation is awkward and limited by comparison, but i am glad for those who do it."

2 weeks ago,I tried a promising variant of elements for a further reel-out/in method with a far better maximization of the space;I shall give details later.When main elements of a prototype will be ready and in case of investments from WOW for example, I should be very happy Dave Lang wants to make a "formal computation"  for it.

Dave Lang is the only one in our list to be able to make a precise simulation,and one of the best in the world in the field of tether.

PierreB

http://flygenkite.com

I reckon you are onto a good thing there Pierre.
Gearing the outstroke so as it is more resisted, whether with springs, moved weight, slanted rail electrical resistance, pressurised fluid... any other method.
Can surely gather more energy than running a reel out fast downwind... well ... it can "in my mind" anyway.
rod

Gyrocopters and Helicopters have a couple of significant differences in their behavior. These mostly stem from the air passing upward through the rotor disc of the gyrocopter
and downward through the helicopter.
Some AWE concepts transition from one mode to the other and most helicopters can autorotate so I know that I am splitting hairs.

Gyrocopters do not experience settling with power.

A tilt head gyrocopter will tend to pitch-over when the flow reverses. (I have seen you mention that one before.) It has killed a LOT of gyrocopter pilots including one in my back yard.

Having an autopilot avoid the coffin corners of rotorcraft flight should not be any harder than the rest of the problems it has to deal with. How many crashes will it take to learn them is the question. I would suggest starting small. ;)

I think the siting limits are already so restrictive that this makes little difference.

Hard wings weigh more than soft wings. This seems like a continuation of the L/D discussion.

As I think about it, a smaller diameter rotor seems less likely to suffer settling with power. I googled and could not find a reference to explain that. It seems the higher velocity downwash would keep itself out of the way better.

Just my 2cents.

Brian

Hi Dave,

Hi everybody! Just want share my impressions. My first good experience with selfmade kite. It's a sled kite 100g weight and 0,6m2 sqware. Without any stabilizer flyes very stable! Of case one of the reason was very good wind (for our region). Have a look. Now I plane to make a catapult or arbalet to launch it in no wind conditions

God Dave S.
I always know when I'm reading a Dave S. post without seeing the name.
I'm not sure what it is about the writing style, but within a few words my mind says "there he goes again..."
Definitely don't need to see the name. By line 2 I know I'm reading Dave S. again. :) Hi Dave! :)

Starting a sentence with multiple-stacked adjectives maybe?
Kind of reminds me of what you would get if someone threw a bunch of buzzwords into a dice-shaker and shook the words up and dumped them out on the page.
Meanwhile, It's refreshing to see that people are beginning to acknowledge rotorcraft. gee ya think?

Nah- just stick with cloth kites. Go ahead! Have fun!

Dmitri just e-mailed me and questioned whether my latest $20 flying wind turbine constitutes AWE(?)
I don't know Dmitri, did the Wright Brothers' flights constitute transcontinental airline transportation?
Maybe the Wrights should have not been allowed in a transcontinental flight discussion - heck they were only a few feet off the ground.

Yes using rotorcraft, starting out lower - hey I know the well-funded smart people are way ahead of these antiquated ideas, but I come from a long history of watching ill-educated would-be wind innovators wasting many many millions of dollars, and to me there's really not that much new going on here, except the latest crop makes bigger pronouncements based on less knowledge, with poorer results, than the previous well-known (in the actual field of wind energy) failures.

Endless attempts to adjust vocabulary and fine-tune the meaning of various acronyms are symptomatic of misdirected energy that leads nowhere. Hey that sounds like a Dave S. sentence! He's rubbing off on me!

call it anything you want. doesn't matter what words you use.
try it, fly it, buy it.
:)
Doug S.
m'kaaaaaay?
m'kay m'kay m'kay?

Congratulations Alex!

PierreB
--- In AirborneWindEnergy@yahoogroups.com, "Muzhichkov" <muzhichkov@... wrote:
was

Dave, it's just with simple carbone sticks. For us is very actual to have some kind of launch device because of the frequent calm. So, I look for kite that can be catapulted in compact form and then can be opened itself. First I thought about parafoil that can be compact folded up in a kernel. Now I see that sled-kite is more suitable. It two times lighter than parafoil and can be folded up in some kinde of rocket. It's almost a mlitary technology :)

Thanks Dave,
You're a gent.

Today's inspiration for me came from bacterial propulsion.
A long gyrated tail takes a helical form to propel through relatively viscous feeling body fluids.

I'm imagining inflated helix (probably double)... with cilia / kites as hairs.

Happy One Sky One World Day!

In a precedent post I mention a variant of reel-out/in.Now the power density is something like 12 MW/km² for wind towers.A kite-farm is expected for about 50 MW/km².With the variant 200 MW/km² is expected.More details will be available later.

PierreB

http://flygenkite.com

Wish I wouldda seen that one, Dave S.
I have also noticed that having someone heavy around can be a "big" help in AWE experiments!
:)
Doug S.

Roderick:
Please see U.S. Patent 6616402 for inflated multiple helix.
:)
Doug S.

Dave S. Thanks for pointing that out.
Yeah ummm I'm thinking my original Sky Serpent demo exhibited:
“both power generation and the autonomous flight modes needed for launching, landing and crosswind flight,” in the 2008 Popular Science Invention of the Year demo flight.

Yes the rotor blades travel crosswind - that's the whole idea.
Also demo'ed at the first world AWE conference in Chico/Oroville, California. It hung airborne overnight and worked again the next day.

Also I think the Shepard team called SkyWindPower had stuff flying year ago, blades traveling across the wind.
And of course Magenn did at least demo something that could fly making power autonomously, albeit not crosswind.

I saw a science show on the elements that spent quite a while documenting how official science spent about 100 years confirming and reconfirming the ancient Greek notion, that anything that burned contained a mythical element called "phlogiston". Every chemical theory of the time revolved around "phlogiston", a completely mythical substance.

Hearing the latest statements regarding "global warming" I wondered how many years this theory will hold sway. The 21st century version of phlogiston?

Maybe some of the current "mainstream" approaches to AWE will turn out to be the AWE equivalent of phlogiston too! Remember the old movies of pumping umbrellas and airplanes that flapped their wings?
:)
Doug S.

Google.org originally contacted us years ago and said the only thing they had to decide was whether to give us a grant or invest in us.
Somehow they never followed up on any of that.
By last year I had had the opportunity and pleasure of spending 3 days hanging out with luminaries such as Google CEO Eric Schmidt at Techonomy 2010. Eric was very approachable and friendly.
When I tried to connect the dots and get back with Google, they just said basically if you know people like Eric, you don't need our money.
Yikes sometimes it's hard to get people to listen!
Oh well back out into the shop!
:)
Doug S.