Wind & Water

[xenith]

webfarmer has a post about wind-powered boats , so I got to thinking about bigger things.

Preliminary findings:

There is Flettner's rotor ship, which webfarmer mentions. It appears on the cover of Popular Mechanics in 1925

These days, there's obviously a bit of thought (and money) being put into wind-assisted ships, where a large kite provides part of the power alongside the traditional fuel motor. These are very big boats.

For a cargo ship driven totally by renewable energy, there's the futuristic Orcelle. There's a lot a talk about this one, type 'Orcelle' into Google

Another renewable energy alternative are solar ferries.

Going back a century or more though, could ships powered by wind turbines/rotors be an alternative to traditional sails? If they were faster, able to sail into the wind, used less crew and maybe less reliant on the fickleness of wind. Would they be practical though? Reliable? Affordable? Doable?

Or what about wave-power as a supplement to sails?

Comments

[webfarmer.livejournal.com]

Nifty PM cover!

For more details on Anton Flettner's rotor ships, one good reference is the Google Books search engine. "flettner rotor ship" tossed in gives several good references under "limited preview".

Rotor ships got rid of all the rigging and labor issues that more traditional sailing ships had. You just spin up the rotors to take off.

Flettner wrote a classic book called "The Story of the Rotor" ("Mein Weg Zum Rotor") back in 1926. It has all the details and more on that project. Hard and expensive to get but often academic libraries have copies.

Flettner is also famous for his rudder design work for large ships. Basically using a rudder for the rudder. Like a trim tab on an airplane wing.

[webfarmer.livejournal.com]

Auf Deutsche but the pictures are pretty cool.

http://www.buch-der-synergie.de/c_neu_html/c_08_08_windenergie_senkrechtachser.htm

http://www.ifb.uni-stuttgart.de/~doerner/windcuriosity.html

[monissaw.livejournal.com]

Ooh, thanks.

Interesting what I could read of them. I took some keys words from them and found http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/1998-11/910132843.Eg.r.html which is all text but I understand it ;)

And there's a Wiki article too http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flettner_ship

[webfarmer.livejournal.com]

You can always toss the pages into the Babelfish or other online translation services for more details on those pages.

http://babelfish.altavista.com/
http://babelfish.yahoo.com/

(Remember when Altavista was THE search engine of choice? )

You might enjoy this as well. Scroll up and down for details.

http://tinyurl.com/2m2sef

[webfarmer.livejournal.com]

This might be fun too. Google patents has some super stuff.

http://tinyurl.com/2eea74

A separate search will find fun items beyond this single patent.