a simpler way to engage more magnet or coil rotors as the wind came up would be to use a graded spring on the stem to gradually engage more clutches as the pull of the kites increased.

They are built like a brick shithouse, and with no finesse they fail. Might as well not comment on what I say, if you know nothing about it. You know what happens when you assume. I never "decried" anything, just mentioned, in passing, what is well-known and not debated by those who know anything about wind energy.

"Brick shithouse" refers to something built far stronger than necessary.

OK, that lifter controller I posted was poor,

absolutely,

there's probably not a huge difference between stacks of kites pulling a ring around
And
Stacked rings of kites pulling a ring around.

The problem with stacking rings over many hubs is angling the rings into the wind. . . Like the single hub daisy stem does so well. But you could mount multi hubs on a rotating wedge or actively adjust bottom tether lengths to angle your tower.

--- In AirborneWindEnergy@yahoogroups.com, "roderickjosephread" <rod.read@... Most likely because the obvious is the most over looked.

Do you have any pictures of this actually being done. Where on the boat are you attaching the kite. I have a 26 foot 9000 lb power boat that would be fun to play with but I come from the conventional sailing world and I have a hard time visualizing how some of these kite schemes really work. I've seen SkySails pictures of their installation on a small freighter but I have a hard time understanding how a multiline kite goes upwind much less a single liner. Making a lot of guesses I would say a 200 square foot kite would move my 26 footer pretty well but I'm not sure how I make it go in the direction I want. I'd appreciate anybody's thoughts/guidance on this. The price of fuel may be creating a situation where the economics of sail assist on yacht size power boats looks attractive.

Roderick:
You can increase the load on a single larger generator instead of adding generators, and do it electronically so there is no wear. The Danes found in wind energy that switching to a bigger, faster generator can work when it gets windier. A lot of the old Danish turbines from the late 1980's and early 1990's had 2 generators. The little generator had more poles for slower operation, and was way smaller, for squeezing wimpy power from wimpy winds.

Having told you I like your imagination, I might temper that statement with the admonition that wind energy works best when it has the fewest moving parts. Also your imagination imagines many things that will not manifest exactly, or even approximately, as you imagine them. You imagine kid-friendly, soft, kite-like surfaces now for example, but the real component that fills that function will likely morph into a hard blade(s) that will kill you if they hit you. (!) Wind energy means real turbines, with real blades! ;)

I remember some real eye-openers as I started building the stuff I had patented - noting patterns after building several machines, I began to see effects that I had not really counted on or foreseen at all, yet once you see them, you slap your forehead and say "of course!". And after you get used to making power from the wind using the least material in the most reliable way, there are a few more "of course" moments. I see a lot of these "of course" things on this list completely unrecognized. Sometimes brainstorming can include a large percentage of drivel, which is to be expected. A lot of it falls into pre-existing, well-worn slots of bad ideas, or ideas that show a misunderstanding of how to get the best results in wind energy.

Dr. Suess and Rube Goldberg are entertaining, but as an example I can tell you we've burned out at least 50 stators and spent about 5 years trying to get a single, very simple model perfected with regard to making enough power in light and medium winds, but not too much in strong winds. This is a model that works well around the world but yet still requires subtle adjustments to handle the most punishing sites, and we're still not satisfied with the performance, though it outpowers any other turbine of the same diameter already (2 rotors).
Still we are not satisfied til it squeezes the most power from light winds while surviving the severe bombardment of the heavy-hitter extreme wind events, even better!

And you have to design for worst-case scenario cuz it will happen sooner than you think. Maybe the first day, or it may take a year. better for you if it happens the first day before you have sold too many impending warranty returns. Think of designing a car with a steering suspension so sensitive and well-balanced, that the car can steer itself around a corner at any speed, with no driver. Make the suspension smooth for the highway driving you hope you'll hit, then make sure it can go off-road at 100 mph for what mother nature will really dish out. Then get your model out there in general use and see if there are any corners anywhere in the world that challenge what you THOUGHT would happen.

You cannot find a reliable small wind turbine. They barely exist, if you really know which one to pick for what use. Even then it's a crapshoot. Getting wind energy devices to run reliably is a challenge comparable to landing a man on the moon. And I believe we had landed a man on the moon before we accomplished serious grid-tie wind energy.

:)
Doug Selsam
\Brawk!

Dear Dave,

Exactly. Yet they fail. No finesse. You got it now.

My point is that you continue to exude nonsense resulting from no knowledge of wind energy. The turbines you cite are not lighter weight, they are far heavier weight. As usual, you just make up your "facts" as you go along, to bolster your fantasies.

I cannot comment on everything you say. Each erroneous notion could require a book and you would choose not to understand it anyway. Many of the things you keep insisting on are non-issues with great answers, but certain aspects may fall into the category of future I.P. It would take too long and also there's no point in spilling everything I'm thinking ahead of the fact, and there's that pearls-before-swine aspect: no matter what I say, you will not only "not get it", you then twist it around to a personal attack on me, based on your own ignorance.

So sorry I gotta back away from addressing each aspect of the things you try to explain are "impossible". Roddy, don't listen to him. He's mistaken, that's all. You can clearly see the unlimited possibilities. They are not always worth explaining. You will find that some people will "get it" and some never will. That will always be the case, might as well get used to it.

The funny thing is nobody here knows much about wind energy as it actually exists, so nobody even sees how funny you are when you start citing "facts" that are opposite to reality. Well I think it's funny and thanks for a good laugh.
:)

Dear Dave,

No worries, and no need to get worked up over my newbie spouting.

Dan, you're the man.

Thanks for sharing some project details.

There are so many factors in generator design. It would help me if I had half an idea of what power profile to expect.
I think that pancake configuration will match the low wind speeds you're going for nicely.

I think the potential of charge control circuitry and large numbers of coils, outweighs my perceived complexity. I'm "quite" sure there is more control over a greater variance to be had there.

Passive attitude control (PAC) 

wish I could see the drawings - I never see them, just see the words....

Stack 'em up and what do you have?

Use real propellers and what do you have?

Reduce your ideas down to the simplest commonality and use real blades: what do you have?

Yes, stacking is one avenue to attain passive attitude control. Other methods are invited.

Which drawings are you after Doug?

If it's the many coils, many phases, complex charge controller I was hypothesising about .... It would be a chimera of a few fischer and pa ykel drums (http://youtu.be/3mad6OgvmSY) and a redesign of a charge controller... so simple

Newb's like me are short on the Detailed, 0.1mm tollerance, 3rd angle production ready, signed off stuff

I'm trying to wing my way with Ozone kites today to see if they can make 12 x left hand side halves of a beginner ram air kite for me.

Slanting the base axis of a rotating set of wings to the desired attitude.

Bungy incorporation into extensible tethers for wind spilling.

Helicopter swashplate

I am very grateful for the advice. Don't worry, I am reusing my same ring size. If we really are at trl 6 / 7
Our prototypes should test real situations.
Back to topic of lifter kite control. Does anyone have a product or a model or plans?

shaft disconnect.on control and power transmission conditioning would need considered. Physical building layout and transmission cable burying would be necessary.
It's a good idea but should we scale up in smaller steps? Old Power stations will keep cropping up.

Those plants are usually rather high capacity, whereas wind is a diffuse resource.  How many miles of kite lines would we need radiating out from a converted power station?

Tensegrity shop  new video 

The fatal obstacle will be to spin a generator of hundreds of megawatts capacity at 1800 RPM or 3600 RPM. Gearboxes are already the weak link at just 1.5 MegaWatts. You'll have to get everything right with your flying turbine 100 times as powerful as today's standard, which are already considered huge and daunting.
"Good luck with that"...
:)

I agree - build small and save your big-money for when you get it all working right.

So many companies waste so much money on complete idiot ideas in wind energy. The latest one that gets me is FLoDesign, funded by Kleiner Perkins. FloDesign added the old idea of a duct to concentrate the wind going through the rotor, though it had been common knowledge for many years that the extra material for the duct required far more material than simply lengthening the blades a bit, for the same power increase.

I had the privelege of long private conversations with the two principals of Kleiner Perkins, leaning on the bar at the Ritz Carlton in Lake Tahoe at Techonomy 2010. I laid out the reasons why FLoDesign was not a good idea and why SuperTurbine(R) was a lot closer to what they were looking for. After the event, the conversation transitioned to e-mail. Through the whole time, I never got the impression that they really understood anything I was saying, though it is all straight from the beginners handbook of wind energy.

Last I checked, FloDesign sold off the professor crackpot wind turbine and raised 56 million dollars for it, and had decided that the name FloDesign applied better to their actual skill set which was not wind energy, but instead raising money for dubious ideas. So now they are an incubator. Maybe all my explaining to Kleiner Perkins helped them to jettison this loser idea, but these guys are smart - they would rather use an idea to raise more dumb-money than just give up. The "greater fool" theory - you may have heard of it... :) hey they are smart - you buy something and decide you don't want it after all, and try to get as much as you can for it.

Now walk thru this logic with me, OK?
You have a GE 1.5 MegaWatt turbine with long, slender blades that already weigh many tens of tons. The diameter is like 250 feet. To "improve" it, you will build a fiberglass shroud at twice that diameter, strong enough to withstand 100 mph winds itself. A structure a good fraction of a mile tall and wide, with 100% area solidity, and with that you can say double the performance - at say 1000 times the cost? And now you have faster-spinning blades that will make noise. Unless you raise the solidity of that rotor adding many wide blades, as they did, to get that power at a lower RPM, and now you've thrown away the whole supposed original advantage of higher power without lowering RPM by sidestepping the use of a larger-diameter rotor. Kind of like building a scaffold to reach a penny.

Anyway, prolly nobody knows what the heck I am talking about as usual so I am signing off now. I just wanted to point out that, yes, one can waste almost unlimited amounts of money on stupid wind energy ideas. The reason, I've discerned after many years, is simple: wind is invisible, so any "story" about what the wind actually is doing can "sound good", since nobody can SEE what the wind is doing. If you can't see it, you can make up any story you want and only educated people (in that subject) will "see through it" (understand the simple reality). Far better to waste small amounts on small machines and figure out for real if you are chasing power or just chasing after another professor crackpot half-baked fantasy.

Seeya!
Doug S.

Ah silly me - you're going to substitute the superior rope-and-pulley technology of the 1700's and 1800's for a modern gearbox, to run a generator of hundreds of MegaWatts. Hey a block and tackle - great idea!
1) You asked if there were any fatal flaws in using the coal-plant site, complete with generator, of a coal plant. I pointed out that you'll have trouble using that generator. I don't care how much rope you use, you won't make it happen. It's way beyond rope. It's a hundred times the capacity of any wind turbine - they already have trouble with gearboxes failing, and that is a few generations of power transmission beyond your ropes and pulleys. So I think, yes I have identified a fatal flaw - forget the used generator. OK? Do you wanna argue any more about that? sheesh. You asked, and I answered. But of course you can't handle an actual answer. Well, I exactly answered your question about fatal flaws. So do I get a "thank you"? Yeah I know, I know - truth is the most unwelcome guest in your domicile of almost pure fantasy. Hey just a little reminder: false statements are often known simply as "lies". Or mistaken statements. Based on ignorance. Someone who keeps saying things that are not true must at some point be tagged as either a liar or misinformed. :)

2) I used to think the same thing about chain for a driveline, back when I was a newbie. Unlike you, I built a 1 kW wind turbine with a chain drive and it helped power a test facility for some time - put my time and money where my big mouth was - It worked for maybe a few months, before a big storm took it out(?). Not sure - maybe it still works - I forgot - it looks intact. It's now part of the SuperTurbine(R) Museum.

I of course asked myself why, of all the hundreds or even thousands of wind turbine models I was aware of, NONE used a chain drive. Seemed like there MIGHT be a reason. Nah but then I contacted Dave S. and he said "yes" so I threw out all the accumulated wisdom of the entire human race over 3000 years - NOT! OK that was a joke - ( but this whole discussion is a joke!) (shut up and get back on topic) (OK) Anyway, what I found was that the chain had EXACTLY the problems that all the veterans had warned me about, as well as a couple more that I discovered myself.
1) Noise - yup chains are noisy, which of course newbies never care about cuz they don't imagine the wife elbowing them to go out and shut down the turbine at 3:00 am, cuz they don't know Jack Shizzle.
2) Rust - yup they get real rusty, real fast
3)centrifugal force - that was the one I had not considered til I read up on chain drives and found that centrifugal force is a key limiting factor with regard to RPM and sprocket diameter.

OK I am done for tewday!
:)

Actually, that was my favourite rant in months.  I mean, just calling something a SHROUD should tell you it's a dead end, eh?  :-)

I agree with Bob,
That was TOP CLASS PASSIONATE RANTING
!!!
Wish I could be even half so gnarly and raging.
Keep it up big Doug.
you should get a gold medal in GRRRR!!!

Yes far better to call it a "cloaking device"...
:)
Cloaking for all that noise from forcing all that air thru the rotor, for one thing.

To be fair, the
duct,
shround,
diffuser,
augmentor,
concentrator,
venturi,
funnel
(the same concept goes by many names, the above list is just a few)
does work and I would not necessarily throw away the entire concept in all cases, but a solid fiberglass shroud has been tried many times, and many companies have gone bankrupt pursuing that version of the concept.

For AWE, the fabric concept (as much as I do sometimes rail against mere fabric, but more for high speed blades), or the inflated donut concept, etc., might be a little more appropriate for anything that guides extra wind thru a rotor.

build build build
fly fly fly
crash crash crash
fix fix fix
etc. etc. etc.
we will get there eventually
:)
Doug S.