Charles Arthur Smith

Doug Selsam, 

Hi All,

I should point out that while it is true that I
have been engaged very actively in simulating the
AWE scheme of my (personal) choice, and while I
have a respectable amount of aerospace experience
in doing things exactly like this, nevertheless,
I have not yet been involved in the demonstration
of a single Watt of power in flight! And therein
is an attribute that sets me apart from (and to a
degree below) those who have indeed done that
very thing, and in front-of-which which I can
claim no particular precedence-in-knowledge of
same.

DaveL





At 4:10 PM -0800 12/30/11, dave santos wrote:

Joe:
Yes Fry was part of the prior art considered in the prosecution of my wind energy patents. And lots of other patents too. I always saw Fry as one more probably-workable idea. It was somewhat refreshing to see that there were a couple of wind energy inventors not "completely" brain-dead, though you might note that we don't see successful Fry designs out there (Anyone pursuing Savonius is usually ALMOST brain-dead). If anyone had started building them, maybe they would have progressed further, but the Fry proposed devices are very different from mine. It's funny what you realize about some of the pictures and concepts in patents, when you start actually building and running turbines. You find out some main effects you have to deal with are not predicted by ANYONE in ANY patent or anyplace else! Certainly Nothing Professor Crackpot will ever know about! And anyone who knows what they;re doing will not bother to tell Professor C. a heads-up, and if they did Professor C. "already knows everything" anyway! Wind energy is like oil-drilling: A dirty, dangerous, uncomfortable, nitty-gritty industrial activity, aboout which people merely imagining how things work from the sidelines will never have any idea.

The fact that the multi-million-dollar global-warming handwringers cannot be bothered to try such simple ideas, no matter how many years the ideas may sit there untested while the agencies pretend they've tried everything, shows that there is either little sincerity, little skill, little focus, or little motivation to try, really anything at all, in lieu of generating large amounts of meaningless words and paperwork. help - global warming - i can't move my hands - can't build anything - hey my hands are paralyzed because they are... attached... to this computer! Step away from the computer!
No, Fry did not have a SuperTurbine(R).
:)
Doug S.

Lift at the doldrums?    
[ ]  ITCZ   Intertropical Convergence Zone        
[ ]  AWES3004        
[ ]       wiki

Joe:
It's not as bad as it seems at first glance: A patent application must include at least one proposed claim. It's just a rule. Normally the initial claims are unrealistically broad, and not expected to survive the examination process, but merely fulfill the need to include a claim at all. The real claims that will end up being allowed will be worked out over time.
Any input you have to an application is considered in the prosecution. Just use the application serial number in any communication and give your input. You have a lot of good information under your belt.
:)
Doug S.

How 'bout "First To Fly"?
:)
**********************************************8

Thanks for reply having key notions to consider. 

Flying from a kite platform

Hi again Joe:
Fry is prescient in noting that many related possibilities exist.
What he didn't specifically say is, as such future related designs emerged, many of them could be patented in their own right, based on the specific disclosures of specific structures and functions, not covered in the Fry patent.

Here's another example:
I could say: "many rotating blade and kite assemblies are possible, any of which could achieve airborne wind energy". That statement could be part of a patent. The statement would predict future progress. It would not, however, preclude patenting that further progress. One would still expect further, more specific patents to emerge, stating more specific ways that "blades and kites", let's say, could indeed meet the prediction of my statement and enable future airborne wind energy.

Like I said, Fry was one of many inventors with relevant prior art, cited in my patent. The cited prior art all goes thru a fine-tooth comb with the examiners. You don't see my allowed claims reading anything like "a bunch of rotors on a stick", which of course I would love to get, but would never be able to. Just like any inventor, I have to show what is different about my contribution to the art. Just like any inventor, I hope to get very broad claims allowed, but must settle for more narrow ones.

You will note, you never saw or heard of a Superturbine(R) til I came along! The problem is not prior art such as Fry, that was disclosed in my original disclosure, discussed in my patent, and put through the gauntlet by the examiners. The problem is references that never make it to the examiners' attention. References that exist, but weren't part of the examiners' search. References that the examiners didn't know about and so could not take into consideration. That can be a problem, and people who care can provide the references and then let the examiners do their jobs.

Today I'm building a single-rotor turbine, for tower mounting. Why? Small wind turbines rotate most of the time (in windy locations at least), calculated to be like putting about 100,000 miles on your car every year. Yet, owners demand a "set-it-and-forget-it" level of reliablity, and are unwilling to do any maintenance, since ANY maintenance means dropping the tower, which means bring in a truck with winch, or a crane, and crew, to the tune of hundreds of dollars minimum, more likely thousands.

Failures requiring this level of service usually happen long before the customer has come anywhere NEAR breaking even on electricity produced versus system cost. The manufacturers are typically overwhelmed and months behind with warranty repairs, with the downtime being about the only thing that gets the turbine through its warranty period without totally destroying itself within the warranty period. Many installers get disgusted trying to deal with the manufacturers, and go out of business. Good luck finding anyone who even knows how to fix a broken system! It quickly becomes apparent to most owners that they will never have a trouble-free turbine experience, and that the turbine will never pay for itself. At that point it has become merely one more expensive hobby, masquerading as the answer to saving the world from global warming.

So, while the next generation of flying turbine is a huge challenge, a reliable, economical tower-based solution also remains elusive, at least when long-term survival of small systems is taken into consideration. There are basically no reliable small wind turbine models available, after all these years, and I've learned enough about making things extra-strong to support multiple-rotors and extra-powerful to handle all that extra power, as well as extra-effective in storm protection, again since furling with extra rotors is an extra challenge, and I'm thinking all I've learned makes building a reliable single-rotor turbine more of a slam-dunk. Everything I build is already ten times as strong as it would have to be for a single-rotor, which is about the level of extra strength you really need! As one crane operator for GE-Wind told me "When it comes to wind energy, the key is BEEFY, BEEFY, BEEFY!"

Believe it or not, there is NO reliable small wind turbine in production in the world. Lots of choices on the market, lots of inflated claims, with the difference in price determining if it will last 2 months or 2 years.
The biggest names litter the landscape and the landfills. We burned out another SuperTwin(TM) just a couple weeks ago, after over a year of trouble-free tower-time, thinking it was finally adjusted so we'd never see another burnout.

After the next adjustment we inadvertently burned out still more electronics further down the line, by accidentally hitting it with a power spike from a turbine running unloaded (which goes into overspeed and stores a huge power (both high voltage and high current) spike in the rotor's rotational inertia - oh yeah - woops!). Duh we must been distracted or something. OK now I've got it all worked out though... No really!

OK gotta go skiing, as it is a BEAUTIFUL New Year's Eve here in Sunny Southern California and it's about 70 degrees out and bright, and I can see the snow from here!
:)
Doug S.

Joe,

Thought you'd appreciate this one.

Dan'l
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj6zM9PBpUc&feature=player_embedded

Just in from the post office:
India Patent # 248480
A FLUID CURRENT MOTOR FOR EXTRACTING ENERGY FROM THE WIND
Issue Date: July 18, 2011
Inventor:
DOUGLAS SPRIGGS SELSAM
:)

Yeah, I love that description, thanks Dave.

https://sites.google.com/site/kitepowerresearch/project-updates/toptiedmountainpassfollowingtower 

Yes you are right Dave S. Approximating the Earth's surfaace as flat, and sticking with Newtonian physics for your rotating parts - woops in your case, non-rotating parts - is probably the best way to go. Your electronics can use some quantum effects such as tunneling, but you don't need to know about those, just use the parts, and your machines can be built using mostly caveman standards. Blades, for instance, can be tree limbs scraped into shape with sharp stones, as mine are. Oh wait, yours will be organically-grown, hand-woven flax fabric - no wait, hemp) All you need is one caveman smart enough to figure out how to make it all really work!
:)
Doug S.
(Oh yeah I make blade fabrication look easy - heck it IS easy! After a few hundred, or a few thousand blades. Anything is easy once you know how to do it! Hint: I do not measure much, just make them look right, just as I do not consciously make a math project out of crossing a busy street. The only thing that tugs at me is, I know there are far easier ways still, that will take a little experimentation to work out).
Oh yeah also, speaking of natural fibers, what about hemp? Maybe hemp is the answer to AWE? Hmmmm? What uses could hemp have for AWE? Hey, how 'bout using it to help think up the solution? ;)
duhh I think I'm really smart now! what was I doing again? Oh yeah, working on a windmill. Get back to work doug!

add Doug as an extra "vote" against

yeah hmmm, you sussed me Doug. you'll probably not be too surprised if I go into the details of some of my flashes of inspiration.
Roderick J Read

Netherlands.      Jan Westerink. 

I was just thinking about soda-bottle rockets using compressed air and water, and wondering how much higher you could get using the same air bottle running a helicopter.  However, even an inefficient rocket might be a good way to loft automatically launch a pilot kite.  Presumably, a simple rig could reel in the bottle and re-charge it automatically.  

Making a spud canon is an essential part of later childhood 

The LAGI competition opens today.
Our designs can be particularly matched to this kind of competition...
they are beautiful and graceful, they can match the skyscape of New York quite well.
I imagine a tower either end of the ridge suspending spinner sets as per my last drawing would help compliment the manhattan skyscraper look.

if anyone is interested.
http://landartgenerator.org/designcomp/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lswBDZuL-8w&feature=share

Instead of a backwards drag based system a forward leading attack lifter should be developed, this would shorten the tether(less weight) and yet gain the least amount of drag and weight, still acquiring max altitude. Please check the video link. thanks.

Dan'l

Condor config would be a good start.

Don't your FAA rules specify anchor at a single point? Maybe last week when you were touting the advantages of drafting rules ahead of the machines, multiple anchor points did not seem important? I'm getting a little confused here. The all-talk formnat seems like it's getting itself into a self-contradictory logjam.

Oh well, not producing anything just became easier: "We realized we need multiple anchor points to make it work, the week after we agreed to a rule prohibiting multiple anchor points."

Oh well that's what happens when you always know the answer...
I have little doubt at this point that AWE will be slowly made impossible due to our own ground-based and paper-based activity.
Congratulations on aquelching a perfectly viable new technology.

Hi Dave S.
It is true that, for some people, thinking is not a waste of time. Others seem to do an awful lot of thinking that is completely illogical or amounts to nothing. Witness phlogistan.

And of course we've all seen examples where too much thinking is harmful. Like if a bunch of rules are made for an emergiung technology before it emerges, with the rules themselves helping to insure that the technology can never finish emerging.

I don't think it's accurate to call my attitude "pessimistic". That's what all wind energy veterans get, all day long, from the crackpots. Their machines don't work, but there's always an excuse ("We need a different generator that can achieve high voltage at low RPM", "We're planning on making our next machine stronger" etc.).

If any veterans point out any obvious previously-disproven aspects, rather than address the facts, the newbies tag the veteran with the label of "pessimistic", or produce other emotion-based dismissiveness, and the targeted concerns are thereby glossed over or ignored, free to rear their ugly head if the proposed machine ever flies.

It's been an ongoing online Yahoo Groups comedy for at least 10 years. Well it was, til they prohibited nonsense from the regular Yahoo Wind groups...

I had been starved for nonsense for a couple years til this new group came along. I tell the people over in the real wind energy groups:
"You think you have seen crackpots? You have not seen ANYTHING!! Imagine if instead of mostly sane people and a few nuts, you had the ratio reversed???"

:)
Doug Selsam
http://www.standardwindturbine.com

Pessimistic? That AWE will forever remain an open field? No that's actually great for me. It's reassuring that there's really no competition yet. I hope it stays that way. I'm counting on you Dave S. :)

I remember reading Shepard's patents 30 years ago, thinking "Uh-Oh somebody else has noticed that wind energy will be best carried out in an airborne fashion. Gosh any day now we'll see such obviously-workable flying wind energy systems emerging."

Then the years began to roll by. The years turned to decades. I've even been privileged to meet the Shepard family in the last few years - nice people (Hi P.J.!). The only remaining question in my mind is, with so many workable designs, why are no Shepard machines flying? This remains a mystery to me since I see no major technological hurdles. That's just one example of workable ideas not being pursued, while the big-talkers go on endlessly talking and trying nothing.

Now I see everyone from NASA (where have you been for the last 30 years NASA? Come up with anything that works yet?) to Honeywell (How's that laughingstock 10-times-as-expensive, 10-times-as-heavy, non-productive rooftop turbine working out lately?) announcing nonexistent "breakthroughs".

Another Preth Releath!

Never have I seen a field where so little in the way of results is expected. Then again there's religion, there's comedy, there's politics... OK I guess I get it. No results are expected from anybody, ever, no matter what, in AWE. This is simply a venue for stringing together meaningless words in an endless effort to prove we are smarter than each other. And this is probably being repeated across the web in various fields. Maybe what's wrong with the economy is we all decided we'd rather sit at a computers trying to prove how smart we are by typing, and we've all forgotten how to actually DO anything!

:)
Doug Selsam

What about a compressed air cannon to launch a power kite? Foam sabot that has a trigger to open it when working altitude is reached? Could allow launching in more confined spots and a flying recovery.

MK

Stay on topic? What a great idea.
Perhaps we should have a simple litmus test for nonsense here. We could start restricting who is allowed to post. We could set a minimum concept demo threshold of being able to make a given amount of energy in a given amount of time. If you demonstrate that your system can generate that amount of energy, in that amount of time, your opinion would be considered relevant, and you would be allowed to post. If not, not.
:)
Doug S.

Dave S.
So your position is that:
1) multi-anchor point systems are the (new) final answer to AWE;
2) Making rules now is (was) advisable;
3) The first rules prohibit multiple anchor points;
4) This is good since (you think)) it gives you an advantage for now?
5) You can always get the rules changed in the future if your newly-illegal concepts ever prove superior. (aim gun at foot, pull trigger)
You are a nut.
I think you should get a job.
:)
Doug S.

Some notes on "more than one line" to airborne aircraft to moorings that are soil moored, vehicle moored, free-falling mooring operating, powered-aircraft moored: 

Dave S.
In my brief skimming of the latest nonsense, I noted a reference to AWE systems being restricted to only a single anchor point. I just told you about it as one might politely notify a blindfolded bicyclist that he was about to go over a cliff. :)

--- In AirborneWindEnergy@yahoogroups.com, dave santos <santos137@...