Solar Voyager Position

Already impressive...

Contraband perhaps?

are you for real or what?

jh has a point. Having come ever so close to my sailboat broadsiding a sleeping whale 500 km west of the Azores, then arriving at Horta about the same time the Portuguese coast guard brought in the survivors of the sinking of their sail boat after it slammed into a shipping container, one does not put such an ''invisible'' craft as the Solar Voyager in the ocean to the potential peril of mariners. Add to the whales, shipping containers, the huge chunks of wood that wash out of the Congo, Amazon, etc. rivers, and the thousands of primitive unlighted small craft plying Third World coastal waters, and you are advised to post a 24/7 lookout in the bow when you would normally do so only when sea ice may have been a concern.

potentially murderous ?? I've sailed for years so I get the concern.I guess I thought this was an engineering site and we talk about technology and science. I don't see a murder plot I see an impressive project that is well underway

This is an engineering site and proper engineers would not just try to cross the Atlantic with the vessel, they would try to cross the Atlantic safely. If there is not enough power to drive it and to light it as well then build it two feet longer and add on more solar cells. If it has no navigation lights it is not fit for the environment where it is deployed. I don't consider that impressive I consider that ill conceived. The fact that I regularly sail in one of the world's busiest waterways and have personally encountered this specific danger means I have an axe to grind about this aspect of marine safety. Which puts me in a better position than most to point out their error but the fact remains that the error is present for me to highlight.

I emailed your gracious compliments to that team

Hear Hear

Just because parts of the project are impressive the fact that key safety aspects are omitted makes this an utter fail.

I love the optimistic assessment that it avoids shipping lanes. Clearly it crosses the main shipping lanes from Caribbean / Most of East Coast US and Panama canal to UK / France / Nordic / Baltic to name just a few major shipping routes. Now the big commercial vessels will have radar but they are going to be mighty pissed to have to travel round a huge circle to avoid this device. Additionally I like that someone on the project website has pointed out that their power calcs require 25 hrs per day direct overhead sunshine!

There is some seriously impressive engineering in this project I would expect but as was also pointed out currents in the area run 6km/h so you'd expect a dumb log to make the journey in a similar time. Ok a log cant control its destination and if this vessel ends up at the intended point that will be impressive.

Lets all remain calm shall we.

The Solar Voyager is radar-visible and avoids shipping lanes, Penny noted

https://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/autonomous-solar-boat-makes-historic-journey-across-atlantic/68820

UPDATE:

I emailed this team, they responded, they seem pretty responsible to me even if some minds differ on this point

response.....

Re: your project

Solar Voyager (thesolarvoyager@gmail.com) Add to contacts 7:04 AM To: Steve b Hi Steve, Thank you for your detailed email. I will try to answer your thoughts: 1) Yes, the boat has a circular white navigational light that turns on automatically at night. This is to ensure the safety of other people as well as ours. The navigation light is at the top of the back tower of the boat. It is hard to see from the pictures but there is one. 2) The boat itself is made of aluminium, hence it is radar reflective. Even though a radar reflector would definitely increase radar signature. 3) We also have at the last moment painted vivid fluorescent orange stripes along the sides of the boat and on the tower so as it is more visible to others. Inside the pictures, you do not see it as the pictures were taken before we applied the fluorescent orange stripes.

Thanks for the info on the safety issue and putting the topic up for us -

For all who may be interested, here is the latest data from the Solar Voyager site:

Late in the afternoon, but close to the Summer Solstice, the PV seems to be perking at half the propulsion power need. This is a brutal test of the PV - electrically, optical fouling, wave pummeling, bird poop, sargassum, you name it. And the smallest amount of fouling on the prop when the rpm is minimal can put a lot of hurt on forward progress. I wonder of there is a feature to reverse spin the prop (like the top of the line garbage grinders) if a fouling stall is sensed. Fascinating endeavor.

rather than an entirely fixed system. one that could have provided some moderate daily tilt ( towards the sun) would have yielded more electrons

Yes but it adds to the complexity and reduces the reliability having to add the additional sensors, actuators and moving joints (seawater is very unforgiving).

In addition, unlike a nice simple fixed site on land the craft is moving on and through water constantly in all 3 axis making tracking and adjusting difficult and more energy intensive. In an application on a small craft like this I would not bother with solar panel position tracking at all.

good points but I was thinking of a fixed program with 3 positions point East in the AM UP MID MORNING AND WEST UNTIL EVENING REGARDLESS OF CLOUDS. a super simple program and a small DC motor. I'm big on solar tracking

I wonder how many smugglers are considering this as a viable alternative to their semi-submersible boats.

Ok so they have hidden a navigation light where it cannot be seen in the photograph (does it shine 360^o?), they accept that a radar reflector should have been added (at such a low profile it's existing radar signature will be dismissed as clutter) and they painted some high vis. stripes after the photo was taken (my crystal ball did not pick that up, it must need polishing). But my interest was aroused so I looked at their web site and started doing some maths. (By the way I was the one who pointed out the current flows on their site.) Spherical geometry is a pain to do and I could not be bothered so the figures below are all approximate

I took two data points at random Numbers 2059 and 2060. There was 5hrs 48 minutes between these points and the speed at both the start and finish was nominally 0.75km/hr, so they should have traveled 4.27km under power and about 30 km on the Gulf Stream current, so a total of 34km. I then checked the GPS co-ordinates for both data points to discover that they had actually traveled 90meters on a heading of about 115^o. This co-insides with scaling off the map on their web site. They give the boat heading as 331^o so the vessel is moving backwards!!! I have no way of checking the wind speed and direction in this location at the time but the only explanation I can offer for the lack of progress (educated guess) is that the wind and current are opposing each other and the wind was cancelling out both the current and vessel thrust. For the rudder to have any effect the vessel must move at a minimum speed, so I am postulating that with so little power the speed through the water is insufficient for the rudder to steer the vessel, which explains why it is going backwards. On a couple of occasions it has added so loops to it's path so the actual distance traveled is roughly 20% more than the theoretical distance traveled. In the area it is passing through the Gulf Stream current and the Labrador current meet and cause local eddies which swirl round. The loops could be explained by either these eddies or by local wind conditions (but I would expect much greater deviation from their track if it was wind).

It appears to be drifting at the mercy of current and wind. I get less impressed the more I study this project.

From the way points on the Solar Voyager site, it looks like our little PV boat will traverse a short distance (less than 50 km) north of where the Titanic went down in April, 1912, or about 500 km SE of Cape Race. Having been in this area in mid-summer, I recall what was a rather surprising definition between the two currents, passing across a fairly clear line, including confused chop, between the two under sail in about 5 hours. The languid remnants of the westerly current of the Gulf Stream was lost but was more than made up for by the onset of a major summer frontal system off the continent that broad reached my boat east at almost 400 km per day for over 3 days. Hopefully, the PV boat will benefit from such a tail wind.