So if anyone is planning to use "blue tarps" etc., I just noticed that big dog food bags are made from something similar and strong, but smaller. If you know a place that goes through a lot of dog food, such as a kennel or dog pound, well that may be a source of a large number of free rectangles of a strong and fairly durable fabric of a certain size. Otherwise if you or a friend has a dog, save 'em and use them to completely revolutionize the world. (?) arf!
:)

Watching a bureaucracy involved in creative arts can be painful.

Imagine if the birth of rock and roll had been a government program, with Jimi Hendrix having to fill out paperwork to get a grant to develop his revolutionary style of guitar playing.

He could be spending all his time trying to convince government music "experts" (U.S. Marine band?) on paper, that he was indeed capable of playing left-handed, but would prefer to leave the guitar strung up the normal right-handed way (hey you can't do that!)

Jimi's contention is, he doesn't need to re-invent the guitar after 3000 years of development, just apply what is known in a new way.

Ahh poor Jimi. He can barely even play. He's so flusterbated with filling out government paperwork - future "milestones", letters of recommendation, patenting his novel use of chords - heck he barely has time to practice, let alone schedule a gig.

Someone told him if he could just forget all the gubmint paperwork and schedule small gigs in small venues, he could slowly develop his new style and perfect it, using the presence of real crowds to hone his sound and get instant feedback.

But no, Jimi has been consulting with volunteer advisors, and "music incubators", that have statistics that clearly show that so few people go to bars to see bands, compared to large concerts, that a serious music effort should not bother with bars, but target huge concerts. In fact the concerts should be bigger than any concert ever, because really big concerts are clearly the future.

So Jimi labors on, filling out paperwork, traveling by plane, st his own expense, to speaking event after speaking event, where he can do powerpoint presentations showing just how and why Jimi believes a "new sound" is possible, and that he thinks he can show people how to play guitar like it's never sounded before.

They are trying to get funding to hold this very large and impressive concert. The grant will also pay audience members to attend. They'll be paid to applaud, to lend a festive air. They need funding. Big funding. Part of the cost will go to build a special guitar just for Jimi - a left-handed guitar strung up left-handed, like Jimi is. Having an actual guitar should help. Oh, and a large, government-funded replica of a large concert hall in which to hold the demo event.

Then Jimi is going to have to learn to play the new government-funded special guitar, but he is so busy filling out paperwork for his next grant, not to mention practicing his new specially-built guitar (well it has a few problems) all alone, to get ready for his one, big, government-funded demo concert...

Wow what a beautiful day!
Build wind turbines or go skiing
Dang it's "Groundhog Day" again!

:)
Doug Selsam

alternatively we could ban keeping dogs as pets. This would cut huge amounts of carbon emissions.

Yes I think we need a world agency to ban nearly every activity in the name of carbon, and charge huge fees for anyone to do anything anywhere in the world, paid to that completely nonbiased and incorruptible central authority. :)

Call it "The Ministry of Banning All Things", and you can head it up!
(Maybe a sub-department of rounding up all dogs would help.)
Then those funds could go toward more research and propaganda bolstering the idea that the world will end without more payments, to that same authority! Now THAT is efficient!
Heck in the end it doesn't matter about the carbon as long as the payments keep coming in. The most efficient businesses are not burndeed with the cost of a product, they just charge money and that's it!

Step 1) Name a few sandbars and tiny coral atolls in the pacific as "nations", preferably where the land is still subsiding in response to the present interglacial.
Step 2) After a previous 400-foot rise in sea levels, extrapolate that CO2 will cause sea levels to rise another inch or two, and exaggerate by 10 x - 100 x
Step 3) Announce "entire nations" going underwater dew tew yer sins.
Step 4) charge yew big bux fer them sins
Step 5) Avoid work while living well, by charging people for preventing them from producing things and doing things.

"Yew have got a lot of nerve driving yer car cuz yew are causing entire nations tew drown yew sinner yew!" Hey where I grew up in NY the ice was a mile thick just a few thousands of years back and everything about the geology and geography are all about glaciers glaciers glaciers.

All that ice melted and sea levels increased by 400 feet, then CO2 levels rose AFTER than, in response to that. That was natural. Now if you check the charts it;s about time for the glaciation to restart, so if yew wanna save the world yew better get behind fracking and we need tew burn as much carbon as possible tew save the world from glaciation, where the real danger clearly lies.

Better still, today's glut of NatGas has rendered it almost worthless so it is just being released, which is far better than burning it cuz the methane itself is a more potent greenhouse gas than mere CO2 which is a pretty weak greenhouse gas.

I hear water vapor is the real greenhouse gas.

Seems like most things green are turning into a lot of gas lately.

Shizzle.
:)

I have managed to really simplify my design for a single to 4 line control pod, for a lifter kite.

Jim Haddox at kitebladder.com is going to make my bladders just for the cost of shipping because he likes my project. HERO!

March 1, 2012

Looking at your design I noted a few problems. The capstans will slip when not under tension and will slowly work their way toward one end or the other. The tethers need to be attached to the capstan to stop this. Then it's not a capstan but a regular winch. The curve that you have on the capstans will center when not turning, as I think you wanted, but will cause the string to climb toward the side as the capstan turns. If you only make one or two turns this is not a problem. Check out flat power belts and you will see that they use a crowned pulley. It's a bit counterentuitive. You can't use a crown because it will slide off when not in motion. So a flat bottom slot makes sense to me. If you have several turns the string will walk toward one end. If it hits the end it might slide sideways as large ropes do on a capstan or it will step on top of itself and head the other way. When that hits the wrap that is coming off then it will bind and stop. Placing the left and right strings in separate grooves on the same pulley would keep that from happening.

When your done you have one of these:
http://www.pololu.com/catalog/product/522
A sail wench servo. That one is rather small and only does 360 degrees or one turn.
There are versions that do 10 turns lock to lock.

Brian

Thank you so much, that was a wonderfully instructive reply Brian.

Attachments :

Most of us are doing our best to keep our AWES prototypes as simple as
possible. It keeps costs down but we sacrifice robustness. The blog
dated January 19, 2012 at the bottom of the page explains this rather
well.
http://herdingcats.typepad.com/my_weblog/

A quote of the critical paragraph (hope it comes through);

Robert.

Robert:
Good analogy.
While cars and airplanes grow more complex every year, both started with an inherently stable physical configuration. Let go of the controls of either, and the car will roll to a stop, while an airplane will continue to travel in a straight line.

Computer controls now allow us to create a physical "house of cards" dependent on computers for its stability. But wind turbines, with the 24/7/365 operation in winds that vary in power from a feather touch to the power of racing engines and power plants, have the highest requirement for longevity and inherent stability of any system known.

While a system basing its basic, inherent stability on complexity and computer algorithms, including the idea that this data stream will never fail, is possible nowadays, is it the future? Is it a good idea? Or is inherent physical stability still the best starting point?
Doug S.

A tree leaf is pretty simple.  Its primary job is to catch sunlight, but in a high wind, it turns into a narrow cone, saving both itself and its support structure.  A kite array might use struts that can buckle to reduce loads, and recover elastically when the wind drops substantially.  Members with a range of load limits could progressively modify an array to keep the tether load near constant over a wide range of wind.

 

Funny I look at that list and think how different the way I'm proceeding is.

I'd need a guy who could build wind turbines in his sleep and create balanced rotors by eye in a few minutes. People who can design and build rotating electrical machinery by feel without even doing any math. People who can use a lathe without killing themselves. People who know how to lay down a decent weld. People who know how to shop and deal with suppliers on the phone. Most importantly someone who could give back more in productivity than I lose trying to explain anything to them.

Yeah I mean some CAD skills might be nice, but the biggest thing would be to not give up at the first sign of any difficulty or challenge. Wind energy is simply "too hard" for 98% of people. There is no room in this field for people who don't perform.

Programming? If your concept needs a computer for basic operation, consider going back and design an inherently stable configuration. Being smart is not always about how much code you can write, often more about how much code you can not even need.

I find you gotta be like the Marines: They are trained to run toward gunfire instead of running away. In this field you have to run toward work and not away. Most people just want to talk, avoiding actual work, and hope someday somebody else will do all the work.
If you add up all the meetings, conferences, talks, proposals, presentations, ceremonial events, obligatory paperwork to qualify for more obligatory paperwork - heck it's easy to blow thru millions and suddenly realize it's mostly going toward a bunch of hot air and empty talk, more than building and testing every day.

I got to the point where the big question became: "If this concept is now proven, why aren't you further along?" The answer was "Because I am here talking to you about it, rather than perfecting a single example of this new concept." The obvious answer was "stop talking about it" and take the Nike slogan seriously.

It was very painful to blow off the ARPA-E event, but hey, after a certain point, how much more of a "mutual admiration society" reaffirming a belief in Global Fracking - er um I mean Warming, do we really need? Is it really helping, or is it more likely killing us with multi-billion-dollar debts like Solyndra - hey just make our currency worthless by acting like it has no meaning! Why just waste small amounts of money when you can bankrupt the whole world at once? Hey don't worry - somebody is making that money somehow.

I used to say at such events "SuperTurbine(R) is drilling upward for energy instead of downward." At one point, I was told I had to have a single complete "business plan" for a technology that, by its nature, opens a Pandora's box of possibilities. That plan had to start with a slogan. I could never really think of a good enough slogan I guess - "More Rotors = More Power" didn't hit it, so nobody was able to help further than that. That is about how much "help" I get from any direction. My take was that you can call it whatever you want but it has to work and survive and be reliable and economical. I mean, did Solyndra have a slogan? Maybe that was their problem - not a good enough slogan.

"Help" almost always takes the form of merely giving me a new assignment. Some advice perhaps. Like the importance of crafting the perfect slogan. But I'm already doing everything. I push the cart over the hill and they jump on for the ride making it just that much heavier. Is it possible that anyone could just help to push? Not likely! The best thing I can do when someone wants to "help" is often to run as fast as I can in the other direction! :)

An interesting new concept will always remain just that: an interesting concept, until it is made into "a useful product"...
:)
Doug Selsam

OK have some time today. So here goes.

Couple of dozen other more serious efforts? I only know a few in their class. Perhaps you could list 6?

Complexity. You constantly beat them up for complexity. But if AWE was simple we would have had it decades ago. Are they pursuing the simplest solution? I don't think so. Will they find it eventually? Perhaps. Is the simplest solution perhaps a yet unknown one? Likely. Their is no proof I am aware of that your chosen direction is better than theirs. You seem to be presenting your opinion as fact. My opinion is that yes there will be a simpler system ultimately and it will probably be more tension based and softer than what Makani is doing now. But that is my opinion, not some hard fact.

It reminds me of a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes.
"I wouldn't give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity; I would give my right arm for the simplicity on the far side of complexity"
(Dare I use a famous quote again.)

You attack their credentials as kite surfers. Kite surfing is on the cutting edge of kite technology.

You imply that they don't have traditional credentials. PHDs and such are meant to help show competence. The lack of them is not an automatic indication of incompetence. It just means that you need to look at something else to determine competence. I like to look to results. There are more competent people without traditional credentials than with. For example, Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were college drop-outs.

They are looking to hire a credentialed engineer as you posted in another thread. They are far enough along that they see a need to fill a gap and are doing so. Good business in my book.

They have rich friends at Google. Why is that a bad thing? I wish I had rich friends. But I don't covet others good fortune. More money in AWE research is a good thing for almost everyone. "A rising tide lifts all boats." (Dang, There I go again with quotes. and I don't even know who said it.) I admit that when one group gets all the attention it can take the air out of the room for everyone else, but that is just temporary. If you want to break that cycle then do something grand. Like break a world record, build the best ever power generating kite, or even send out one of those press releases that Doug hates so much.

Brian

There seems to be something to be learned from all sides of this thread...

1. Makani seem to be very good at marketing their "product" testing a cool prototype gadget...
2. Dave S has a good lot to say and great ways to say it and encourages COTS projects...
3. Doug and others like seem to be really good at hands on projects...
   

To balance this together consider....
Launching a kickstarter  project

1. Come up with a quick half proven scheme for the cool prototype gadget you want to test
   
2. Specify the COTS components for your open source hardware arts project, and make people feel good about donating to it.
   
3. Get building quick and get paid to do it.

There is a market of interested people out there looking for us ... they just need a help finding us.

Hello everyone

For those of you that have not yet seen the Video of the first KiteGen Stem flight in the Italian version of the website. Here you can find it with its relative English post.
http://goo.gl/wpduJ

Enjoy..

Stefano Serra
s.serra@kitegen.com

Good who's who.
Skysails and Kiteship are producing traction not electricity. I do like what they are doing. And they are replacing oil. But I worry more about the effects of coal rather than oil. Oil will slowly price itself out of the market. Coal will slowly kill us with it's pollution. Another reason they are not my favorite is personal. I live in Missouri and don't want to move. Perhaps after the kids are grown.

TUDelft is also one of my favorites. I knew they would make your list.

Windlift. Clearly serious. But I am not seeing innovative ideas being tried out.

Ampex, KitEnergy, are doing good work and are serious but they seem to be running known wing formats and/or at smaller scale than TUDelft Makani.

Kitegen I have mixed feelings about. The sideslip is really cool. Launching with fans from that pretty glass house seems unrealistic. But they have real prototypes and are clearly making progress.

Kitves I had not heard of. I can't see any prototypes on their page.

I guess that's the 6 I asked for. ;)

Magenn, I think I feel about Magenn the way you feel about Makani. I fail to see how the Magnus effect can compete with coal under any circumstances.

Boeing, All I have seen is a 3d drawing done by one of their engineers when he was bored. I don't call that serious.

Joby, I like that they are exploring nontraditional kite and airplane forms. A giraffe doesn't look like an elephant or a tiger for good reasons. But they do all have 4 legs, 2 eyes and a neck.

I don't have time to go into the rest. But in general they don't have full time personnel building actual flight hardware at scales large enough to differentiate them from the model aircraft and kites that they spring from. Not that they are not contributing I just don't put them in the same class as TUDelft and Makani.

I need to go back and read the flygen vs groundgen discussions. I think I see a preference from you for groundgen, but I am not sure. I am thinking groundgen is a bit better but I think the jury is still out.

Brian

On Tue, 2012-03-13 at 14:02 +0000, blturner3 wrote:
I don't think the jury is still out at all. Generators are heavy. The
stiff blades needed to drive them around are heavy. With flygen you have
to invest too much hardware and energy getting the thing into the air,
and keeping it there. You then have to get the power back to the ground
which multiplies tether costs. The future is groundgen! Maybe generate
enough power with flygen to power the airborne control systems, but no
more. Conductive tethers slightly increase the ever present lightning
hazards.

Robert.

I think it is good that somebody flags overly-optimistic statements and inaccurate or exaggerated claims by highly-funded and especially taxpayer-funded efforts.

Realize though, you are just stepping into the middle of an already wasteful and exclusionary system, based on filling out reams of paperwork just to qualify to submit even more reams of paperwork.

The sheer mass of paperwork quickly overshadows any actual meaning contained within the paperwork. The technical reviewers may have a clue, but only that, else THEY would be solving the energy crisis(?).

Politically-correct-sounding nonsense takes the place of whether you actually HAVE anything worth pursuing. For example you get lots of points just for CLAIMING that you will lower the cost of electricity in a given geographical area, saving x number of dollars over so many years. All one has to do is pull such figures out of their ass, then put them into a form that looks bureaucratic and slightly too complicated to bother to go thru and argue about, and you are on your way. It's all about format and buzzwords.

The addition of a couple of professor crackpot opinions, such as affirming that, yes, there is more wind at higher heights, locks it in. You need to include the PhD credentials - without a PhD there might be some doubt that the wind is actually stronger at higher heights. Buzzword and credentials count - common sense is worthless.

This is how companies like Solyndra and FloDesign come to waste millions of your dollars without missing a beat, in some cases getting permission to pay themselves bonuses as they wink out of existence, mere moments after wasting half a trillion dollars! Oh my God I have never gotten a "bonus" for ANYTHING I have ever done in my life, let alone anything I have failed at, and the figure of anything approaching a trillion dollars has not even been in the common vocabulary for most of my life!

It's almost like common sense, or any kind of sense, has taken a vacation. Anyway, I can tell you that this kind of dynamic, where most potential innovations are completely ignored while a few, based on affiliations, credentials, and filling out lots of paperwork, are given huge funding, is not all that new.

We have to decide if filling out that much paperwork is worth the effort, as opposed to what else one might accomplish with that time and energy.

All in all though, to get funding, one has to put something in front of them that at least sounds like it could possibly work, and give them something that sounds like a good enough excuse for wasting the money after it doesn't work. That's the bottom line here. Nobody wants to get fired for being a complete idiot. So you need to provide plenty of excuses up front. In this excuse-driven world, you must plan to fail, in great detail That is the key.

Think about it - if you are successful they won't (in retrospect) "need" any of that paperwork - it is only when you fail that it becomes important.

Have a day!
:)
Doug Selsam

Today I've been:
1) watching the stock market
2) fabricating WindyGIRL(TM) automatic brake electronics for a customer in Sweden
3) sending requested pix to an author in Europe (Eize DeVries - leading wind energy author) for an article he's writing on alternative turbine designs...
4) sending more requested pix to WindPower Monthly Magazine in Europe for an article they are doing on alternative turbine designs...
5) Then I get to work on more SuperTwin(TM) turbines...
6) Gotta do maintenance on my houses later...
7) working on a fabricating a wooden tower like traditional farm water-pumping windmills use...
8) working on a welding up a steel mount for the top of that wooden tower...
9) meaning I gotta go out and buy the steel...

This freestanding wooden tower might be helpful in developing airborne designs, vertical-axis designs, etc.

It might also help in developing an aesthetically-acceptable product for residential/rural areas, since many homes and ranches around here display old farm windmills as "yard art": the wood lattice tower configuration is grandfathered in as "aesthetically-pleasing".

Ever walk into a restaurant and see that the "decoration" consists of stuff that could have been laying around your yard, or a junkyard, or some stuff you might see on its way to the dump, instead hung upside-down from the ceiling, it becomes beautiful, fascinating, and highly-desirable?

Interesting how stuff has to be seen for 100 years then it;s considered OK to look at. Even telephone poles with too many wires are sometimes now considered "art" or "ambience".

That's where emotion enters the field of wind energy - what will you be allowed to put up? Is it ugly enough to be considered beautiful?

Anyway I wish I had 10 of me, or just 10 people willing to roll up their sleeves, period (OK I guess one of me is enough, even for me!).

It is absolutely AMAZING to me to have SO MANY completely workable AWE configurations that could be built one after another and run right away, many involving nothing new whatsoever, and to be comparatively paralyzed by having "only two hands", while I listen to the world lament the lack of AWE solutions, degenerating into a bunch of empty talk and envious complaints about how much money others are wasting on their own brand of nothingness...

Also seems so silly to keep hearing about millions "needed" and all these beard-scratching engineers and PhD's etc. - for what? How hard is it to build windmills, flying or otherwise? They are simple machines! No beard required.
;)
Doug S. :)

Doug, I feel your pain. Not a lack of design or desire. For me its lack of money, and area. Also the lack of hands. People just dont get togather and do stuff anymore except go to bars and get drunk it seems. Or , they are just too wound up in "How much money in it for me" So I basiclly do it myself anymore and wish for my youth and the friends that would always show up to work on Anyones off the wall projects with a vengance on weekends. Man, I sure miss those days.

I'm coming in on the tail end of all this,and if its ground that has already been covered, my apologies. But has anyone looked into the Kingfisher Areostats? Half balloon and half kite for lifting your payloads. http://www.southernballoonworks.com/balloons/kingfisher-aerostat-wind-capable.html

I'm behind the 8 ball here and request a little help. Lets see if I have the basic "forms" of AWE down.
1. Kites in motion figure 8's , in & out's and back and forths , moving ground based generators
2. kites attched to a rotating center shaft that turns a ground based generator
3. Lifted and air born generators.
Does that about cover it ?

One incomplete crash course: 

Do you think it would really need 1000 sq feet?

Hi Dave, Yes I agree.
My thoughs were The Inital Lift to Height for reaching wind speed to sustain kite lift for the payload, then Decouple the King Fisher, for reuse.
The king Fisher as you may know likes to maintain a near vertical lift profile in winds, instead of listing down range which eats up realestate. Consider it a reuseable launch vehical
The lift gas would be Hydrogen for this application. That could be made on site at the down drop for the substations.

Sorry , forgot to scrub the replyed message.
I'm learning. 8)

The second prospect of using the king fisher could be as a assist lift. Say if the winds at height are forcast to die out enough that the kite could not support the payload. The king Fisher could be ran up the tether, coupled, and remain aloft supporting the kite and payload until the winds pick back up . Or,It is ran up, coupled, and the whole system is brought down in a near vertical fashion.
Where as the kite alone could crash down if it got low enough to not generate any lift any more .