A year or two back I saw a proposal to generate power from energy
expended by walking.
The clever thing was that they were going to capture waste energy for
instance the energy required to slow down your lower leg as it swings
forward.

Rather than using your muscles to slow down the advancing foot there
would be a generator on each knee with a one way clutch that would
engage at the end of the forward stride.

An elegant idea but I expect the cruel realities of manufacturing tiny
generators, gear reducers and clutches may have killed the economics
of the idea.

Andrew

wow cool,
that's just like some of my drawings, fluting spinning parachutes rising up.

I hope it works well for them.

Dr. Suess?

Skechers had a shoe that supposedly gave you athletic training (extra exercise when you walk). I guess somebody figured out it didn't do much after all, then there are possible injuries.

It occurred to me though, that if you DID come up with a shoe that gave extra exercise, that could only come about by making it harder to walk. How long would people keep using shoes that were hard to walk in?

We see the same thing in clean energy: Professor Crackpot is always coming up with, say, a road that makes energy from the cars driving over it. Wow professor, you are a genius, so what effect does it have on the cars? Ohhh a mushy road is harder to drive on and takes more gas? Oh so the energy is not free? The road generates power, but only if the cars use more gas to drive on it. bbbbut professor, you said...

How 'bout onboard hydrogen generation, for "added performance" or "better mileage"? (hey do they call it "mileage" in the UK?) And the hydrogen comes from... the battery - and the electricity comes from... the alternator, which is powered by.... the engine.

Wait professor crackpot, can we also fly by pulling up on our own shoelaces? Wow great, you have introduced a whole new theory - let's call it perpetual motion!
:)
Doug S.

They may have no intention of doing the experiment, just of charging you if you do it and it works well.

Yes, Doug, I actually had a job winkling those absurdities out of a list of contest entries last year.  However, the one described below really does take advantage of an inefficiency in our leg action. 

a Dr Crackpot original.

you can use it if you want.

good luck to them if they try that too.

It looks good to me...
I could draw some little people on it...
holding onto wires, jumping off, lay a trampoline as a floor...

I feel really bad about not applying. I'd love to meet Bill C. Then again I've been at a Wind Energy Conference that had Dubyah speaking and I never even saw the speech, let alone the Dubster.

It is a difficult choice between working on solutions, or endlessly "announcing" future progress that will never actually take place because one spends all their time announcing, and none developing.

It takes so much work to prepare for and attend these events that it takes way too much energy from actual development. I've spent a lot of time at such conferences thinking if only I was back at the shop I could be getting something done.

The reality in the field of small wind turbines is there is only one halfway reliable brand, made in the USA, and it is way too expensive. ($70k installed). Almost all small turbine models can be counted on to fail quickly when placed in a site with a good wind resource.

We're almost there with regard to making ours "100% bulletproof" so it can always be counted on to still be running after a storm. Many companies sell too many units of models not fully debugged, and fail as the warranty re[pairs pile up. That is typical failure-driven death-spiral of a wind turbine company in trouble.

I feel that I now have the resources to get a working system developed and if I don't, it is nobody's fault but mine. But all the rock stars should make this conference fun. Wish I were going but I just gotta stick with progress over talk. Tough choice though...

:) Doug Selsam

Hey Dave, I have an idea:
Why don't you get on your bike and ride around the U.S. and do a survey of small wind turbines. Check by manufacturer and model which make how much power, and more importantly, which are even operational. Note which country they were made in, and record which ones are working, and which ones are sitting still, in a non-operational state. Then get back to us with the facts, OK?
(why aren't bikes wind-powered when traveling crosswind?)

I had a call yesterday from a fellow Bergey 10k owner up near Big Bear. I drive by his machine every time we go skiing. He had installed three HY-3000 3 kilowatt turbines, made in China, of the brand HY, on low towers, that I had not noticed.

The owner lamented that the 3 turbines immediately over-volted his 3 multi-thousand-dollar inverters and ruined them, so the inverters had to be sent back for rebuilds. He wanted to know if I could handle fabricating some electronics to "save" his system. I will make the electronics, but I can already say from experience, fix that, and something else will likely be next, as soon as the first decent wind comes up.

Oh and I had another call yesterday from a local friend visiting Laughlin, Nevada. My friend also related as a sidebar, that of the 4 somewhat large Chinese turbines he sees on Route 40, every time he drives out to Laughlin, 3 are still not working after a year and one is missing a blade. We have the same scenario in this neighborhood. The largest of these turbines are almost never seen spinning because they are almost always broken, and if not broken, they are only one good windy day from being broken. So that's 7 non-operational Chinese turbines that I had phone calls on in one day, yesterday. To be fair, it is so difficult to make a wind turbine reliable as to be "almost" impossible, but not quite. Ask anyone who knows. :)

My friend also mentioned that of the 17 Skystream turbines installed in the parking lot at Sam's Club in Palmdale, 7 are still not running after about a year. The Skystream was recently certified by a new government program started by the 2 biggest U.S. manufacturers to certify small wind turbines. This is because without subsidies, the numbers would never pencil out - no small turbine can actually pay for itself unless you are off-grid and simply need the power at any cost.

Guess which 2 turbines are certified? The Bergey and the Skystream! Hey those are the two companies that started the certification program! Who knew? So if they are certified, why are so many Skystreams not operational?

So on your kite-powered bike trip across the U.S., you might also tally what percentage of installed "certified" turbines (of the 2 models certified so far) are still running?

--- In AirborneWindEnergy@yahoogroups.com, dave santos <santos137@...
Reply:
"Professor Crackpot" is a composite caricature of typical, somewhat nerdy individual, armed with "a little knowledge" - some single fact that is taken literally and in isolation, while ignoring all the other facts, already known in the art. "Professor Crackpot" thinks that his "little knowledge" somehow trumps the more "complete operational knowledge" of systems that actually work and survive.

The extreme version of Professor Crackpot, of course, has a beard and wears glasses. His glasses are cluttered with dandruff and dust - the good professor is too pre-occupied with his single fact to take the time to wipe his glasses off. He speaks with a lisp - not because he has to, but because he LIKES to: "Why just SAY it, when you can SPRAY it?" Does he brush his teeth? Don't get too close and you won't have to find out. :)

Professor Crackpot's fantasy is that, armed with perhaps a single abstract fact he has picked up somewhere, his superior mental abilities will trump all the thousands of years of hard-won operational knowledge in a given field, in this case wind energy.

Professor Crackpot could probably never actually get up to speed on the thousands of facts he would need to design, build, and operate a real working wind system. Instead, he's more comfortable endlessly promoting his "single fact".

Here's an example: Vertical-axis high-solidity turbines (Savonius). We've seen a thousand of these come and go. The good professor's single fact is that "vertical axis machines respond equally to wind from all directions".

Likely he cites the turbulence cause by buildings and promotes building-mounted "urban" installations. Using the word "urban" gains the professor psychological politically correct points. And of course everyone can see that buildings are a bnatural place to mount a wind turbine right?

The fact that there are few, if any, working examples of building-mounted wind energy systems, and none that is effective, does not bother the professor. Thousands of previous vertical-axis failures also do not matter. Heck if the professor paid attention to facts like that, he'd never get his idea off the ground! What the professor does not take into account is that:

1) The vertical-axis blades must sweep 3.14 times their intercepted area (to catch wind from all directions equally), so you need 3.14 times as much blade to do the same job. The professor's blade cost just multiplied by 3.14 times and he didn't notice - gotta clean those glasses!

2) The tip speed ratio is lower - probably below 4 rather than above 6 - this will require wider blades - higher rotor solidity - still more blade material in excess of the slender 2 or 3 blades actually needed to make useful operating windmill. The professor again, chooses not to notice.

3) That lower Tip Speed Ratio requires a far larger generator to do the same job. Once again, the good professor did not notice how his generator cost jumped - he doesn't WANT to see it. He's busy convincing investors who are impressed with the level of dust on his glasses thinking: With this much dust, a beard, AND a lisp, he MUST know what he's talking about!

4) The fact that his blades travel PERPENDICULAR to centrifugal force AND aerodynamic forces, and those forces are pulsating with each rotation, rather than steady, means they will soon break. If they are made strong enough to NOT break (more extra blade material) they will then be so heavy they will become detached in a strong wind.

LINK TO PIC OF BROKEN VERTICAL AXIS TURBINE A MILE SOUTH OF ME:
http://s1216.photobucket.com/albums/dd378/verticals/?action=view&current=photo1.jpg

5) High Rotor solidity: Take a high-solidity machine, that a child can see would cost many times the amount of a GE 1.5 megawatt turbine if built to the same scale, while producing perhaps 1/20th the energy, and yet "Professor Crackpot" keeps touting this worthless idea as superior to anything "those idiots at GE" could ever come up with.

The reality is that the GE machine is the product of 3000 years of paying attention, whereas the professor's machine will never be built because it is, in reality, just a dumb idea! It's that simple! Dumb. Period. Not more complicated than that. Dumb. Let's see, do we have anyone promoting high solidity rotors on this forum? Why yes we do! Well this explains where they are really at.

No experience means the first things that occur to you are not up-to-snuff. What "seems" right to a beginner does not reflect more highly-developed technology that is a couple of levels ahead of what occurs to a beginner. Nothing wrong with being a beginner - everyone starts as a beginner, but the ones that become successful pay attention. It is as simple as paying attention. There is already a well-worn pigeonhole in the wall of failed turbine ideas for high solidity rotors.

6) Maglev bearings: Bearing drag using ball bearings is so low as to be almost completely ignored in wind energy. In hundreds of machines built and run for years, I've never had a bearing fail. Bearing drag is negligible. Not a problem. No solution needed. But not all investors know that. They can be led to imagine bearing drag as THE problem. The good professor has the answer to this non-problem: Maglev!

The good professor may be confronted daily with the realities of the accumulated reasons why his vertical-axis maglev machine can never be up to snuff, starting with the fact that his turbine most closely resembles the very first turbines using tree branches and animal skins 3000 years ago, and culminating in the fact that his high-solidity machine, if manufactured and installed at a 300 foot height, would weigh thousands of tons, cost millions of dollars, produce a fraction of the power imagined, and be destroyed by the first decent wind storm.

None of that annoying reality matters to the good professor. All he knows is he suddenly has solved the problems of aiming, urban wind energy, and bearing drag! And to boot, now his machines can capture winds of 2 mph whereas those silly GE machines need 8 or 10 mph to start making power. The professor may even be armed with true facts that say the wind is usually light in most locations, so his low wind speed Maglev turbine MUST be the answer! Only thing is, it had already been thoroughly worked out that there is no power in 2 mph winds worth chasing. But these are too many facts for the professor's feeble brain. He prefers one fact at a time. Much easier to make a case for a single fact than to take into account the whole picture.

So Professor Crackpot yet persists, secure in the knowledge that if only people would listen to him, there would be no energy crisis. Investors can be counted on to take whatever isolated fact the professor is promoting at any given moment, never knowing that they are really investing in the dust on the professor's glasses, not a superior technology.

:)
Doug Selsam

http://www.energykitesystems.net/0/makanipower/Actionable/FalseClaim2.jpg 

Good attitude, more power to you Doug.
Glad to hear things are going so well.
Let us know if you need anything.
Critique and miracles are always available.

A friend of mine is rowing the Atlantic this year...

A friend of mine is rowing the Atlantic this year...

I've never been one for perpetual motion machines so I fully take your point. However it would be interesting to have a sports physiologist look at the motions involved in rowing and ask whether there is potential for extracting more total energy from the human than is currently achieved. As I see it most of a rowers useful work is done on the pull. The process of returning forward to prepare for the next pull uses different muscles and does nothing for forward progress. So if you could have the rower produce power in his forward motion you could double his useful output. Now the question becomes is the rower limited by his total energy output or by the strength of the pulling muscles. Also energy generated on the return cycle really should be translated to propulsive power to be useful. It doesn't make much sense to generate electrical energy for services since it should be virtually free either from solar panels or wind generators.

Yeah, I gave him quite a bit more gip than the wee slagging you saw in my reply here.

You do actually achieve a tiny forward (boat direction) propulsion by accelerating your body back along the rail to the crouched position. If you can engage your blades again before slowing on the seat rail... an all arms then all legs stroke . . . nah no chance

jiggly seats are just to help extend the stroke.

I used to spend all summer rowing for toffs and posh lords, in all weathers. I rowed for Mathew Pinsents uncle and impressed him. (not much of a claim) I HAULED and snapped many oars.

Big wind needs big strokes just to keep a boat in one place.

Hey! Who you calling a professor?

Seriously Bob is right, you are confusing shoes designed to give you a
workout with device designed to generate power from wasted motion.
By helping you decelerate a leg at the end of the advancing stride the
generator actual reduces the amount of energy required for you to
walk.

Whether the power can be generated economically (I'd guess $50 to
$200K for the prototype depending on if it came out of someone's
garage or a corporate lab) or whether there's any sort of business
model in there are much more troubling questions.

Getting the technology to work is just the beginning.

But it is a neat idea....

Andrew in Ann Arbor

Add propellers at spaced intervals, a cantilevered bearing and conventional generator at the base of the shaft, so the shaft can rotate, producing power. It bends with the wind. All roads lead to Superturbine(R).
:)
Doug S.

Hi Dave S.
I don't know how much time I should spend explaining the basics of wind energy to someone who is obviously not interested and indeed show an extreme hypersensitivity to any fact, as though facts themselves are your biggest threat, which I guess they are, come to think of it... ;)

I know that facts from the real world of working wind turbines is not welcome in your fantasy world, but I can tell you I get a call almost every day about Chinese turbines. In the world of working turbines, it is synonymous with "broken". People say it with embarrassment. It usually is accompanied with a nervous laugh. "See I got this Chinese turbine..." (And of course we know the next line is it isn't working out...). In other words it is a well-worn punchline, although the joke is never really funny to the purchaser. It is the worst joke in wind energy. It's not funny for anyone but other manufacturers. Even then it seems sad to see such predictable, repetitive failures. You are just the person who doesn't get the joke, or never heard the joke, or never had it explained to you, that's all. That is expected with no background, or even interest, in real wind energy.

I'm sure you are familiar with the quality of tools from Harbor Freight. It is actually my favorite store! Cheap tools, usually OK for everyday use. They may get you by if you are on a budget and you don't push the tools too hard. But if you need a truly heavy-duty tool for industrial use, you know you had better go to a real tool store, so you're not buying castings that still have the dirt from someone's backyard embedded. If you have a true use for a high-quality tool, buying from Harbor Freight is most likely a mistake. (OK seriously, in reading this back, I cannot believe I am having to explain this to someone).

Well wind energy has the following characteristic: Sooner or later, every location will experience horrendous winds! I mean horrendous! Those horrendous winds will certainly render any but the very strongest wind energy systems non-operational. That's where the Harbor Freight level of "looks OK" quality doesn't cut the mustard. Not at all. And even just good productive winds are a formidable challenge. Most low-quality turbines will fail long before the horrendous winds happen, in merely productive winds, especially if it gets gusty and turbulent.

I think explaining such basic facts to someone who is just interested in stirring up trouble and calling names while flying kites is getting real tiring. From now on I don't want to have to supply any more facts that you are not interested in, or try and illustrate the landscape of wind energy for someone who is not interested enough to already know, so would you do me a favor and stop needling me and calling me names in your posts, and I will do the same? Ideally, there is little need for you to respond to my posts, or cite me in your distressed diatribes. I'd like to be left out of your loop of blather, if you don't mind.
Thanks
:)
Doug S.

This is being treated as a "Professor Crackpot" question, though it is really not. The guy simply asked if he could run a generator while rowing. He didn't ask if it would be "free energy", just if he could do it. My reply would be sure you COULD do it but it will make your rowing that much harder - you will not get a "free lunch" of perpetual motion.

Dave S., your answer is a Professor Crackpot answer. First the whole thing is completely off-topic, and just goes to show how much we are really targeting any AWE solutions (ahh forget it we are now rowing a boat - whatever) Second, your springs would obviously make rowing harder, so I'd say maybe forget the springs and make the return motion run a little generator.

But overall if you have solar already, I'd add enough panels to handle your true electrical needs, since you are bothering to row all the way across the ocean, and, by golly, on a forum that promotes airborne wind energy, not to mention many here want to classify towing a boat with a kite as airborne wind energy, I think the only reasonable response has to be:
Tow that boat across the ocean with a kite and make your electricity using an awe system!
:)
Doug S.

Hey Dave S.:
OK if there is anyone on this forum who resembles the idea of a "Professor Crackpot", it is you.
Everything seems to go over your head, including humor. Professor Crackpot is a joke - a humorous term - a verbal cartoon, if you will.
Sorry, I know that by the time you have to "explain" a joke, it is no longer funny...

Anyone who is a professor, or a crackpot, who sees the term "Professor Crackpot" is free to determine if such a concept applies to them. It reallou has nothing to do with whether the person is actually has an official job as a "professor". More likely they live in their mother's basement or maybe do not even have a place to live. But they can also have credentials and sometimes even a job. Often their job is raising money by ripping off naive investors.

The very nature of a Professor Crackpot means he can never recognize himself as a P.C. anyway, which seems obvious to me. I don't think I need the great Dave S. to now scold me on how they use a word like "professor". Is that really the best you could come up with? Of course, chastising someone for their use of a word IS probably the most productive thing you can think of to do today - that is kind of sad. You could always get a job.
:)
Doug S.

You decelerate your leg by pulling back on that leg, which pulls you forward. So it is not wasted motion. Also since your leg is swinging upward as it swings forward, gravity plays a role in stopping the forward swing. Yes if you could harness "wasted" energy from walking I guess you could make some juice, if you could FIND any "wasted" motion. But then they would not give you any added exercise or fitness benefit.
Selling shoes as a fitness device reminds me of selling a rope as a "solar-powered clothes dryer" - (oh and wind-powered).

Meanwhile, someone mentioned the self-winding watch as proof that generating power from human motion is viable. I second the motion and, since watches are about as relevant as film-cameras and dedicated GPS devices these days, maybe the best place for Dave S. to target his working models of soft whatever arrays is an AWE-powered mobile watch-winder!
:)

Second uses: 

I took "Professor Crackpot" as someone long on credentials and short on talent. Seemed like a functional and somewhat humorous shorthand. Doug's heavy tendency for absolutism often bugs me. But he's posted some of the funniest stuff here. I still laugh whenever I think of the Wright Flyer with a government mandated caboose.
Dave, Your prolific technical posts that have been both informative and highly accurate safely put you past any definition of short on talent in my book.

Wish I had more time to participate here. The discussions, although somewhat raucous, are rather educational.

Have a nice day!
Brian

Dave Santos recently forward one of his many research items in the soft isotropic kite. My first, but avoided, guess was to post the following in that topic thread, but since the following is not "soft" in the sense that he seemed to forward, then a new topic is here started for isotropic kites of the LTA type.    I do not have evidence of the effectiveness of what the two following inventors had in mind, so this topic invites eventual expansion as interest unfolds.    Click image for the full instruction: 

I refer you to post http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/AirborneWindEnergy/message/4756 in which Dave Santos states of himself "the AWE Forum is not an organization i represent (it is not even an organization)."

DaveS, KiteLabGroup, AWEIA, whoever you are -- you DO NOT REPRESENT ME.

I demand no submission be made under the name AWEIA or AWES forum. The forum is nothing -- bits in space.

Per Joe Faust, AWEIA is not an organization.


I have let Dave Santos know my strong preference that he make no submission personally, a la Doug Selsam's analysis of unintended consequences.

However, if daveS does, I demand he does so as some sort of legal entity that has standing (individually, or any REAL actual incorporated entity that he actually represents)

If there are in fact people who agree with you, offer them as cosigners, with their EXPLICIT approval. (I trust it is self-evident I am not among them).

DaveS, you represent nobody but yourself. Don't pretend to represent more than that. That is simply immoral.

Silence does not signify assent. DaveS needs to respect that.

As do I. So with this in mind, please signify that you agree with me on the issue -- daveS must desist from casting himself as representing fictitious, ill-defined organizations. He only represents himself.

Looking at that statement: 

Disclaimers: I am not a patent expert. I only skimmed the patent and spent just a few minutes on it.

Good example of why I dislike the current patent system. Almost all the claims area obvious, not original, not actually explained in the patent, or not useful. This gets past the examiner because the examiner is not familiar with the art. The patent filers may not even care about the above items because they need a patent for marketing and valuation purposes. They also want to be able to harass any competitors that enter the field. And in 10 years it will be difficult to say that all these claims were already known.

The only claim that looks unique of the 20 was #3 putting a full sensor suite into the tether mount so that it has a tethers angle view of the dynamics. The obvious way to do this is with those sensors on the tether rather than integrated into the mount. Not all that important.

Having a dedicated flutter detectors is unique from my experience. The obvious way to do that would be to detect flutter using the existing autopilot. I suspect that airplanes have used flutter detectors in the past. Just because this is a kite does not in my option make it different enough to be original. But the NASA Helios did crash partly due to flutter so I could be wrong.

The idea of vertical launching with motor-generators is certainly patentable. But I don't know if Makani are the ones that originally thought of it. Hasn't that one been around for a while? I think I have seen that illustrated in other companies drawings. They don't reference any prior inventions.

Brian