Harvesting Energy for Seagoing Vessels

"no idea what it is called"

It's called piezoelectric generation.

I'd have to call a "blade less wind turbine" an oxymoron.

Keep thinking.

http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/NHC/CRS/propulsion-9.jpg

One might rig-up some sails, perhaps?

See post #2.

There's a crabber for ya!

If you drop the right electrodes into the sea, it works like a battery. Research it.

I understand that. the thing bout that idea is it will also be like fuel system where u will need to bring something that has energy stored and will have a product of energy and thingamajigs that will be an equal to CO. so if used in huge number will bring impact at the same scale of internal combustion engines and other fossil fuel powerplants. maybe ur view of the byproduct being an innocent thing to just leave in the sea coz it is huge. maybe the early engineers of internal combustion engines thought of CO and lead with the same views but they were wrong weren't they. not forgeting there are laws under IMO what could and couldn't be thrown into the sea. a

I know there are rogue currents in the seas that has yet to be harnessed except it bring problems of hull deterioration due to electrochemical reactions. that was an idea as well but not interested to develop it cause it will be limited to the Shipbuilding industry only. let that be researchd by somewhere else.

A Japanese adventurer designed a small boat "motor" that utilized the action of the waves to propel him thousands of miles in the Pacific Ocean. That might be combined with the wind turbines and solar power. Computer software could coordinate everything to work automatically. A smaller conventional engine could prevent getting stuck in the doldrums, and only used as needed.

Fuel prices would have to go much higher to spark interest in commercial vessels. Ships use very poor quality fuel to save money. Check out the smokestacks.

As evidenced in so many ways, ship owners are rapacious competitors, and very uninterested in anything but payback, and no doubt these great ideas require capital investment with long payback times. Sailing kites work, for high-minded Scandinavian companies. California is banning high sulfur bunker C fuel near shore. If you want to save the world, advocate for taxi-bus. Look it up.

Putting wind turbines on board makes good sense if you can prevent them from interfering with the operation of the vessel. Wind is generally stronger offshore than onshore because there are fewer obstacles and turbines, unlike sails, can be used for providing ship's service power as well as propulsion. I haven't gone into detail on this, but I suspect that when all the numbers are run it would make sense to use wind for ship's service power primarily, and as a propulsion booster in a diesel-electric propulsion plant (which I think is fairly rare at present). This could be a big money saver on ships with heavy ship's service power use - refrigerated vessels come to mind.

Sails and propulsive kites have to be watched and trimmed, and the kites have to be quickly taken in in a dead calm before they fall into the ocean. Ruggedized vertical-axis wind turbines, on the other hand, can be made to furl automatically in a "blow," and to operate entirely automatically in normal weather.

As I understand it, the kite systems are highly automated in operation and self retreiving in the event of low wind.

IMO, There are several advantages to capitalize on with kites including stronger and more reliable wind at altitude, minimal changes to the vessle for low cost retrofit and interoperability with existing ports, and efficiency with fewer conversions of energy from harvest to use.

I don't have a good grasp on one thing you mentioned; the ruggedized VAWT that is self furling. In the context of wind turbines, I understand 'furling' to mean 'turn out of the wind' (typically at high windspeed to protect from overspeed and reduct tower load by presenting a reduced profile) and have only heard it used describing HAWT.

VAWT are designed to be indifferent to wind direction, so it seems unlikely VAWT will have any luck pointing away from the wind or reducing profile during gusts.

Please enlighten me.

"I don't have a good grasp on one thing you mentioned; the ruggedized VAWT that is self furling. In the context of wind turbines, I understand 'furling' to mean 'turn out of the wind' (typically at high windspeed to protect from overspeed and reduct tower load by presenting a reduced profile) and have only heard it used describing HAWT."

In sails, furling simply means dropping the sail and rolling or folding it up. Turning it out of the wind is called "sheeting out." What I meant by furling is taking a more or less standard Darrieus "eggbeater" turbine and stretching the blades flat against the central mast by extending the top of the mast. The blades, when operating, are flexed into a natural equilibrium shape called a troposkein; there's no reason why they can't be made flexible enough to lie flat against the mast when not in use. I thought this up ages ago, honest... the folks who wrote the Waterworld screenplay stole it from me!

Turbine? Your payback will be limited.

Sails will push you UP-WIND

Turbine will push you DOWN WIND. This will work fine if you want to go back to where you came from...

'....Turbine will push you DOWNWIND. This will work fine if you want to go back to where you came from...'

Where is this place where winds always blow towards shore and captains destinations are always upwind???

At any rate, sails cannot sail directly upwind, whereas a turbine powering a prop can sail directly upwind.

Flee to me remote elf

FYI: This is why sails swivel.

And if turbines are the proposed solution, Than he should use a vertical turbine, the main problem with turbines for this application is that they will produce aerodynamic resistance equale more or less to the energy they may produce, problem which is totally in favor, when it comes to stationary turbines. Construction resistance will always be added to the blade speed of rotation and here speed=power.

Sorry I don't believe that turbine power to propel a sea going vessel is feasible.

There are many working models of wind driven land and sea vehicles that can go straight directy upwind on wind power alone. The ones i know of all use HAWT not a VAWT. HAWT produce far more power per swept area than a VAWT.

Powering straight into the wind, actually increases the apparent windspeed and thus power available.

What i found very interesting and highly controversial is that it is possible to go straight down wind, faster than the wind.

Before anyone comes after me siting 2nd law of thermodynamics, nothing is violated.

Rigging is modified in that instead of the wind turbine turning the wheels or prop, the wheels or the prop in the water are use to drive what would be a wind turbine as a propeller.

WRONG. It is possible to proceed upwind in a sailboat powered by only a wind turbine of realistic efficiency driving a screw propeller of realistic efficiency. The theory was worked out in the late forties, and several windmill-boats have been built and successfully operated to prove it in practice.

ur first point is the kind of power I was thinking of, money saver not main movers. Then bout offshore wind farms. is it really that harder than land based wind farms or just a bit different? there would be stability issues that have to be address, but other than that it should require the same specs of coastal wind farms due to the salinity.

Seriously. to design another primary mover to outdo and give a better cost/benefit ratio against the diesel engines of that scale which uses nearly tar-like fuel is a very tall order. not forgetting designing it so that shipbuilders has little problems during installations would require it to either have a research grant billions pounds or have a patronage by the likes of bill gates but has passion like al gore.

Darrieus turbines are very well documented; there's an extensive literature on them from DOE research and Canadian work, plus amateurs who built them for small-scale power supply. They've lost favor with amateurs because it's hard and expensive to get them high off the ground where the good wind is, but this is not a problem on the ocean, where the surface boundary layer is much thinner.

You could gather data with a small, non-retracting Darrieus turbine mounted on the foredeck or some other place where it would be out of the way, or made easily removable. If the results (energy gathered over the cruise) justified further work, a bigger turbine or a turbine array could be installed and connected into the ship's service distribution system (the experimental turbine/generator would just be connected to a dump load for easy removal). The scaling laws for these things are well understood, so the question of whether it is economically desirable could be answered at small scale and low cost.

The turbine itself requires no development. I am not certain that a retraction mechanism would be needed other than to save deck space. If it wasn't, a simple brake would do for stopping the turbine in storms, and those are well known.

I have a possibly good invention for sail powered ships.

Make the mast oscilatory in a transverse way and prolong it to the water trough a watertight seal.

The part of the mast under water has the shape of an oar and it works at the venetian stroke style

This vessel advances well completely against the wind by olcillating the sail. But in normal sailing situations it will get a good help from the submersed oar if you let the sail oscilate, that does not detract much energy to the sail.

Chorete.

Illustration of Drive Mechanism of Suntory Mermaid 2, which sailed from Japan to Honolulu (7800 km) using solely wave power.

http://yachtpals.com/boating/wave-powered-boat

You could coat the bottom of the boat with strips of graphite and metal and turn it into a giant Salt Water Battery. The Sea would be the electrolyte.