We expect oil companies to enter AWE for both diversification and greenwash motives, and its happening without much notice. These companies are so big, the AWE activities tend to happen in an uncoordinated piecemeal fashion. One oil company stands out as a considerable low-profile actor in AWE; Royal Dutch Shell, the largest company in the world, by revenue. 

We noted a loose Shell connection when Allister Furey's Red Kite Energy sought a Shell Livewire Award. But we mostly overlooked that TUDelft AWE work tapped Shell (and Dutch gas utility) funding starting years ago (The Economist, April 2007)-

http://www.economist.com/node/8952080

"Wubbo Ockels of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands has been developing another approach to airborne wind generation at lower altitude, with backing from Royal Dutch Shell and Nederlandse Gasunie, a natural-gas company."

The article documents some badly slipping timelines, suggestive of failure to make the needed AWES architectural paradigm shifts.

Aympx spun out of the TUDelft program, and now we see a well connected Shell exec as its business director. Prior to working for Aympx, Wolbert Aallart was Investment Director of Shell Technology Ventures and General Manager Business Development of Shell Renewables. 

Wolbert was a surprise visitor at an AWEIA/AWEC meeting in Brussels last week. His is a new face, a possible game-changer, but seemingly walled-in by cliquish AWEC politics, possibly contractually stuck drinking High-Complexity kite plane Kool Aid.*

No doubt there is more going on than we can see or get to know about, but we watch and await further developments. In the TUDelft-Ampyx case, we see Shell harmlessly engaged in scale-limited AWES architectures, rather than poised to win a monopolistic role by a sharper strategy. This gives open-circles more time to organize alternative biz models.

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* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_the_Kool-Aid

Hi Chris,

Wow, the Royal Clipper is a recreated wonder (if not exactly a clipper). Wind Star class boats are banal by comparison, but all modern sailing ships show an amazing reduction in crew need compared to the Golden Age of Sail. My guess is that the image-conscious cruise lines tend to replace sails when they look dingy and patched, rather than when they are truly worn out. I looked at global UV, and Roddy seems to live in the best place of any of us (Isle of Lewis), with 1/5 the UV of tropical hot-spots. In a low-UV location, sails might be more fatigue limited than UV vulnerable.*

The guess of 10MW "equivalent rating" for a windjammer class boat is looser still, since HAWT ratings are based on wind higher than "most probable" wind for most locations. "10" was rounded up to help calculate with fingers and toes. We know also, that near Hull-Speed, engine or sail power can double, but you don't get much more speed, although more power extractable by, say, towing a second hull or turbine ( a grunt-power mode).

As for the modular sail units characteristic of these ships, Mothra kite design sizes the tarp sails in manageable units below the likely failure-prone unit-scale. This "divide and conquer" design strategy has key advantages in localizing damage to a single unit, as a rip-stop feature, and also enabling quick easy replacement (even hot-swapping aloft someday soon). Since Drag-Force is a major classic kite principle, the sail can blow out of shape quite a bit without excessive loss of power. We know that some creep of our polymers only makes them better performing, which is why slowly prestretched kitelines are preferred. It may be that we someday rotate Mothra sails according to this lifecycle effect.

You mention "stress distribution" of  big rigs. The Mayan hammock is a good model of a (human-rated) tensile net that passively distributes loads in a highly optimal way, by its diagonal Bias Construction. In our favor, the larger the kite, the smaller the characteristic turbulence scales, which means most disturbances are subscale, and cancel. There are many other megascaling fudge-factors and caveats, such as the design option to reduce frontal solidity (increase porosity), and reducing sail (furling) during storms, but our modern cloth materials are truly amazing, over an order of magnitude stronger than cotton and wire rope by weight, which is way-strong. 

Where it gets exciting is that the (crudely) calculated scaling limits of a Mothra rope-loadpath network (the "rigging") in a tree-like branching pattern seem to at least match or even exceed the troposphere height scale of about 10,000m. This is the wonder of scaling a quasi 2D structure in our 3D world. There is a progressive scaling limit, but it gathers slowly.

Its our sail handling ability that seems to scale-limit us more than anything. We may need winches power-rated beyond any machinery yet devised, although a lot can be done by a line pay-out strategy ("push" turning, trimming) and cascaded killing. We know some "power-amplifier" mechanisms made by rigging methods.

It must be wonderful to sail on even the more soulless modern tall ships. A motley fleet of mostly Hollywood-built square riggers used to visit our small Port of Ilwaco here on the Lower Columbia, but the channel has silted and shoaled, and federal funds for dredging were cut, thwarting my stowaway plans :(

daveS

PS Pierre, Kite life should be closely comparable according to "realtive wind", crosswind or not. There is a greatly accelerated aging in higher relative wind, with even short load-peak events having a drastic effect. It pays to protect our sails by careful use.

----------------------------
World UV Map-

http://www.soda-is.com/maps/world_uv_ab.png

daveS

* "Test-to-Destruction"

Two more Fraunhofer notes-

Fraunhofer Society's Institute for Wind Energy and Energy System Technology (IWES), is (or has been) conducting a study of Kite Energy-

 FlipWings (membrane wingmills) are anti-nodes, the moving part of a harmonic AWES system. Because they are less obvious, we have hardly considered the static harmonic nodes as such; like the ground/anchor point, the pilot-lifter kite, and corner-block drogue, as a simple single-unit case.

Ideal AWES harmonic nodes are solid and stiff, so as to dissipate as little harvested and transmitted energy as possible. Therefore, the ground is an ideal AWES node, but kite lift and drogue tension node design needs to be optimized to present as much embodied mass and aero intertia as possible in the direction of motion. Natural kite and wind mass and elasticity are inherent to self-oscillation.

In practical terms, this means that a larger lifter kite and droque is better (up to a point). They should made with low-stretch low-porosity material. Node mass and sail area directly opposed to anti-node motion both count. Pure ballast mass can even be a useful airborne node.

A static nodal wing is tensile balanced at its static CE. An antinodal wing is LE attached, like a flapping-flag. Its CE moves fore-an aft and flips sides with each flap. Mass-spring resonance of both the hardware and flow regulates the action.

As an example of what might be possible, consider a "laddermill" consisting of alternating nodes and anti-nodes in a powerful stable "ladder" oscillation of standing waves tapped at the base. It would not need to rotate weakly in an endless loop; instead the antinode wings would sweep crosswind in well ordered passive harmonic synchrony. A test will be devised to see how well this sort kite train does.

------------------------------

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(Legal Note: Open AWE CC sharing and claims rest on "artist's moral rights", under the Berne Convention. Inventing is a true creative Art, by long tradition. The intent in Open AWE is to make the widely emerging new form of CC IP voluntarily accepted and fairly valued, as AWE's professional best-practice standard. Comments invited.)

Rod Read

15a Aiginis
Isle of Lewis
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 Bali is an epicenter of the great SE Asian kite culture. They make two general classes of kite: Refined formal types and wildly inventive ram-air 3D theme kites. Long before modern ram-air parafoils and soft theme kites emerged from masters like Jalbert and Lynn, the Balinese where creating all sorts of fantasy figures in the sky; animals, superheroes, improbable looking vehicles, and so on. Just-name-it and they can make it fly.

The typical Balinese fantasy kite begins as a thin fairly flexible open armature of lashed split bamboo or wicker. It is then covered with a papier mache well attached to the framework. By long experience, the Balinese learned a key secret, to leave a wind opening at an aerodynamic stagnation point (like a mouth or chest area), so that the whole figure pressurizes.  Overpressure adds stiffness overall, keeping the stabilized paper from promptly fluttering itself to pieces. The internal pressure field even ducts itself into windward inflated detail. Here is the direct technical precedent for modern theme kites. For their part, parafoils began with a fully open stagnation zone, and have evolved toward small valved intakes, Balinese-style.

For our pioneering Airborne Architecture experiments, the Balinese design language is ideal for creating an ultralight crew crew cabin as flying 3D architectural structure with a sense of substance and shelter, without undue flapping. An optimal cabin will have an albacore form with a small wind window in the nose for ram-pressure. This new ram-air hybrid of modern mountain tent and Balinese flying object will have safety netting as its underlaid "foundation", and kite-lift "pavilion" arched overhead, as a big step toward a well-realized airborne architectural format.

Circular Track and Carousel Kite Farm surface concepts are conceptual competitors to KiteLab's Anchor-Circle Belay-Rotation method. Obviously, an anchor-circle is far cheaper and faster to deploy, with far less environmental impact from embodied material and land disturbance. 

Tracks and carousels still promised a narrow operational advantage, the apparent ease of rotation of a kite arch formation. The early circle-belay method was shown to be workable (Mothra1), but even with a depower input, required powerful winching to haul the leading side of the arch to windward. While powerful belay winches were but a fraction of the capital expense of a carousel or track, they would still have been a major capital item. With the new method described here, such winches are not needed.

Lately, Mothra arches have developed a second set of load-paths that converge on the center of the anchor circle. These new loadpaths enable monolithic loads to be lifted with well distributed forces, or the power outputs of many WECS to converge at one center point.

A centerpoint anchor therefore enables an entire arch to rotate semi-passively to match wind direction, much like a single-anchor kite. All that is required is to slack the side-lines so the arch rotates briefly from the center anchor. Once rotation is completed, the side-lines are re-tensioned to once again act as deterministic stabilizers, and wing-area maximizers. 

Brief depower-repower of the arch would be a refinement of the method. No massive belay winches would be needed. The new load paths contribute to the working-load safety-factor (8 to 1) and are fully able to take the full ordinary load of the arch (at a 4 to 1 safety margin, with the slack sidelines as "preventers").

This new Easy-Belay method seems to be the last key solution needed for optimal kite-farms based on megascale kite arches flown from anchor circles (or "anchor-fields"). It will be tested and perfected in upcoming small-scale sessions. The idea is a natural extension of the offshore rotating arch method JoeF recently identified (single-point deep-submerged bridle).

CC BY NC SA

Sean Gallagher  Ars Technica

 Joe,

Noting this site is gone, 

Not sure what the hosting deal was...

dave

A push-turn in stunt-kiting is done by releasing tension one line with a push-motion. This takes far less actuation force than the common pull-turn for the same end-state (the extra force makes a sharper quicker turn).

Similarly, a megascale kite arch that needs to rotate by easy-belay can crosslink the windward side to the leeward side so that releasing the windward side powers the hauling to windward of the leeward side. The belay is done with the same anchor circle as before, but a couple of pulleys and some extraline avoid the need for a massive winch. In effect, the belay is self-powered by weathervane-force. This is a "centerless" solution.

As a dopey paradox, it was necessary to design, build, and test a powerful belay winch for Mothra1, in order to then see it as unnecessary.

CC BY NC SA

 

Makani's stellar new Board Director, Cathy Zoi, was a key figure in creating the well-known US Govt. Energy-Star appliance standards. She took top appointments in Clinton-Gore energy programs and recently held high positions in the DOE as an Obama appointee, and ongoingly helps Al Gore's climate organizing. Her and her husband's involvement in major greentech investment constituted an appearance of potential conflict-of-interest, but she took the revolving-door to the private sector, which tables that issue for now. 

As a partner in Silver Lake, she is a high net-worth type ( Landis+Gyr stockholder), with a probable equity stake (or option) in Makani. Based on conversation with Corwin in 2011, Makani did not have a lot of corporate flexibility then, and required restructuring for any new set of major equity-growth deals. Apparently these changes have proceeded, and the Zoi announcement is a clear signal (this is still a deeply secretive venture). 

Lets hope she does not just parrot Makani's notorious hype, but comes to understand its paradigmatic weaknesses and seeks out the many agile-engineering diversification partnerships required to succeed. Her geology and engineering degrees will help.

Director Zoi will surely keep Makani afloat for a while into its daunting scaling-tests phase. The announcement of major new new investment seems to do with Zoi's friends at Soros Fund and Silver Lake. This aerospace Money Pit won't belly-up for lack of cash on her watch. Still, Makani's "high-complexity" AWES architecture remains far (if ever) from utility-scale viability, compared to other "low-complexity" concepts under development. Mega-investors like Soros are warned to take broader plays in AWE, to minimize the risk of a single narrow position. Zoi still has some work to do to to "position (Soros) perfectly" in AWE.

If the new Makani contracts are not restrictive, and she runs with this advice, Zoi may be ideal to lead the entire AWE sector. She must learn our deep technicals fast, and take a broad global view of the R&D. She faces an interesting challenge and opportunity in sorting out AWEC-AWEIA politics, with talk of cooperation, and even a possible merger, now going on. 

Lets all warmly welcome Cathy Zoi to the AWE Community.

http://www.makanipower.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/20120107-Makani-Zoi-Press-Release.pdf


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathy_Zoi

 

Lets be very precise- Makani over-complexity is definitely not the "most advanced AWES", just ask any of our senior aerospace pros like DaveL, Fort, or ChrisC. Makani has been a six year high tech dog & pony show of mostly wasted capital for a fizzled platform that has yet to complete an end-to-end all flight-modes session. 

Even your small AWES is "more advanced" in terms of TRL (Technology Readiness Level). For over twenty million dollars, Makani barely ever made the power of a small motorcycle. They may not even rank in the AWE top-ten, if you count practical potential. The Makani Jumbo Autonomous Offshore Carbon Aerobatic E-VTOL Flygen concept is simply quite unworkable for a long time to come.

But thanks to the early Google connection and years of skilled media hype, Makani has "mindshare". Their existing small team must now grow by several hundred real aerospace engineers, with hundreds of millions required, just for starters, if the Soros capital is flowing. Do not presume they will act as stupidly as ever; We may even be capitalized or hired by sharp new analysts ;) The Makani Brand could easily end up printed on Forum-derived open-source low-complexity megascale soft-kite groundgen kite farm concepts.

We created this reality by the excellence and clarity of our work. Forget the fatalism over Bay Area social elitism and prepare for our collective success in eventual third-party due-dilgence testing, such as DaveL and Fraunhofer and many others call for. We will hold Soros to this, or laugh at their dead-end play,

daveS

 

On Jan 20, 2013, at 7:24 PM, dave santos wrote:

The New Year is off to a fast start, with two new game-changing players in AWE.

First we learned that Fraunhofer is eager to preform AWES-tech third-party validation and due diligence in an comparative Analytic Study with Simulations and Fly-Off. Every serious AWES architecture would "get its day in court" as DaveL has put it.

Then we find that Soros has entered AWE R&D, and will be needing to cover the initial play in Makani with a diversified strategy. This will be the Basket approach we have defined, but with a single private Angel with enough capital to complete all our equity-phase milestones.

So let Soros pay for Fraunhofer's services, and for all the world's best AWE teams to complete the engineering due-diligence phase. Then the way will be clear for vast follow-on investment, with handsome profits for smart Soros managers to take credit for.

There is an urgent need to put together all our best ideas (including the social goals) into a plan that we submit to Zoi, ASAP. The risk is to lose an early window of opportunity, and face more years of unfair competition against an artificially revitalized Makani.

Cc: Damon, to copy Makani Board.

 

 

 

Pierre,

We depend on testing to settle our opinions. At least we know that safety and reliability drive aviation success.

You wave a red-shirt to keep saying things like "Makani is a good AWES for now". There are so many better AWES- Enerkite, TUDelft, and WindLift clearly have superior price-performance. Also count SkySails as an AWES (never mind Mothras).

daveS

Cc: Damon, please Forward as needed.